
Class PS 2, 5<b^ 

Bruik ■ M S T 5 

CopjTiglil N" 



COP\'RI(iHT DEPOSIT. 



IN A NEW CENTURY 



BY 
EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN 

AUTHOR OF "a LITTLE BROTHER OF THE RICH," " WINDFALLS OF 

OBSERVATION," "tHE LUXURY OF CHILDREN," "tHE 

COURTSHIP OF A CAREFUL MAN," ETC. 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1908 



Copyright, 1908, hy Charles Scribner's Sons 



Published, September, 1908 



V.I8HARY ofOdNfiRESs) 

SEP 26 l^Ob 

-US', 1*^0*^ 







CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Too Much Success 1 

Proclivities and Compunctions 23 

Reading 38 

Writing 53 

Exclusiveness 77 

The Impossibility of Living on Anything a Year 95 

Riches . . 109 

Character and Money 134 

The Spiritual Quality 149 

Noise and Canned Food 162 

Divorce 177 

The Prospects of " Society " in America . . . 192 

Summer 207 

Convictions 221 

Speculation 238 

Is Honesty Still the Best Policy? 251 

[ iii 1 



CONTENTS 

Some Advantages of the Common Lot .... 271 

Woman Suffrage 285 

The Seashore 300 

The Habits of the Sea 316 

Deafness 334 

The Quondam Club 349 



[ir] 



IN A NEW CENTURY 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

The fortunate people — the truly fortu- 
nate — are not so much those who suc- 
ceed in life as those who succeed in living. 
There are some who do both; many who 
do neither, and some who do either one, 
but not the other. Success in life, so 
called, can be overdone, but hardly suc- 
cess in living. It seems possible to suc- 
ceed too much in various lines of attain- 
ment, legitimate and sincerely profitable 
in themselves, but success in living in- 
volves getting the most out of life, not in 
a day or a year or a decade, but in a life- 
time. That involves living wisely, and 
you can't live too wisely. If you could, 
and did, it would be unwisdom, and that 
would be a contradiction in terms. 

Of course, succeeding too much is not, 
and is not likely to be, a common mis- 
take. Comparatively few people ever get 
[1] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

a chance to fall into it. The great major- 
ity of adventurers don't succeed enough. 
To succeed notably calls for qualities that 
are rare; very valuable qualities, most of 
them. Yet there are familiar cases of 
success so commonly held to have been 
overdone that consideration of them will 
at least be helpful to discussion. The 
basis of the prevailing jealousy of trusts 
and corporations is the feeling that some 
of them have succeeded too much. Those 
that have failed — a great number — have 
not excited jealousy. They have merely 
brought sorrow to their stockholders. 

In particular, there is one great and 
conspicuous corporation that set out years 
ago to succeed in business, and managed 
its concerns with such energy and sagacity 
as to make its methods a model for its 
rivals and neighbours, and its name the 
very synonym for success in trade. The 
man who managed it showed a genius 
for business. The associates whom he 

[2] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

chose were almost without exception able, 
self -controlled, decent-living men; astute 
adventurers and tireless workers. The 
leader was indomitable and insatiate. 
No degree of success in the field he had 
chosen satisfied him so long as any fur- 
ther degree was imaginably possible. No 
measure of commercial success that had 
ever before been set served as the limit 
to his aspirations. He aimed to get all 
there was in the business without concern 
whether there would be anything left in it 
for anybody else, or for what anybody 
before him had been satisfied to get out 
of any business. An ambitious person, 
certainly. His methods need not here be 
discussed — whether they were lawful ac- 
cording to the laws of their time, whether 
they were moral according to the business 
standards of their day, whether they were 
unwarrantably ruthless. There was no 
question of their effectiveness, for by 
them he succeeded in his aims to a degree 

[3] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

unmatched in familiar history. He en- 
riched himself preposterously, enriched 
also every one who cast his lot in with 
him and left it there, and made the cor- 
poration of which his spirit was the soul 
the most remarkable — perhaps the great- 
est — business concern in the world. 

Get away now from the personality of 
this man of commercial genius and con- 
sider merely his corporation. Did it suc- 
ceed too much.^ There are, no doubt, 
gospel and philosophical reasons for say- 
ing that it did, but pass them by as inap- 
plicable to a corporation. There is no 
certain indication of oversuccess in the 
mere possession by its shareholders of 
embarrassing riches. There may be such 
a thing as too much money, and some of 
them may suffer from it, but all that is 
hopelessly debatable. The corporation 
money may not be worth to some of its 
possessors all that it has cost ; less at less 
cost might, and probably would, have left 

[4] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

some of them in a better case to pursue 
happiness, but that, too, is too large and 
vague a field to wander in. It seems 
more to the point to suggest that when the 
corporation succeeded so much as to dis- 
turb the balance of things, and imperil 
the stability of that attitude of the public 
mind on which its own permanent pros- 
perity as a corporation depended, it 
crossed the safety line. This happened 
when it had succeeded so profusely, and 
left so many crushed and yelling competi- 
tors squirming in its wake, as to force it 
upon the attention of the more thought- 
ful of the half-admiring, half-deprecating 
spectators, that like success, procured by 
like methods by a few score of other cor- 
porations in other lines of business, would 
leave the population of the United States 
in bondage to monopolies. Then the 
spectators began to suspect that it had 
succeeded to a degree that threatened 
the commercial, and, indirectly, the politi- 

[5] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

cal, liberties of the people, and in that 
suspicion there were the seeds of discom- 
fort for that corporation. It seems then a 
purely secular and material opinion that 
when its success had made (or seemed to 
make) compulsory its own restriction, 
the prohibition for the future of some of 
the methods it had grown by, and the 
curbing of its imitators, it had gone some- 
what too far. It had achieved a prodig- 
ious, a monstrous, success in life, but, 
even for a corporation, a dangerously im- 
perfect success in living. 

Take another case. 

It is admitted that a lively interest in 
athletics is very good for the young men 
in the colleges, and that it is important 
that it should be as widely diffused among 
them as possible. It is good for them to 
play together; good for them physically, 
socially and morally, and the good of 
it is recognized in all the more favour- 
Tel 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

ably situated colleges by ample, and often 
costly, provision of boat-houses, and broad 
fields for football, baseball and all the 
other out-door sports. Almost every col- 
lege president would be glad to have every 
one of his young men devote a part of 
every working day to some lively out-of- 
door sport. The open-air exercise is 
good for them, and the democratic influ- 
ence of games and physical contests is 
excellent. And as competition is the life 
of trade, so from the first it has been recog- 
nized as the life of college sport; so that 
the contests between the colleges that 
began in this country — more than half a 
century ago — with a boat-race between 
Yale and Harvard, came about naturally, 
and have extended to practically all the 
colleges, and to nearly all the sports in 
which undergraduates engage. But the 
colleges have rapidly increased in num- 
bers, and have kept growing bigger and 
bigger, and the contests between them 

[7] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

have multiplied and every year gained in 
importance, and interested more and more 
spectators, until conservative observers 
now complain that these competitions 
have lost their original and true function 
of encouraging undergraduates to take 
wholesome exercise and have wholesome 
fun, and tend rather to confine the active 
participation in athletics to a compara- 
tively small body of undergraduate spe- 
cialists who excel in them, and who are 
constrained to devote to them a good deal 
more time and energy than they can spare. 
This seems to be particularly true of 
foot-ball, which, though a valuable fall 
sport in a great number of schools, pub- 
lic and private, all over the country, 
seems in the colleges to have become 
chiefly valuable as a means of adver- 
tisement. 

Let us try to see what has happened to 
intercollegiate athletics to make such alle- 
gations as this seem reasonable. 

[8] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

There is a maxim to the effect that a 
thing that is worth doing at all is worth 
doing as well as you can. It is as hand- 
some and engaging a maxim as there is 
in the book, and has the complexion of 
self-evident truth all over it. Neverthe- 
less it isn't so. There is a large abun- 
dance of things worth doing and necessary 
to do, and for each individual there are 
only a select few things that are worth 
doing as well as he can. The rest are 
only worth doing as well as he can afford 
to do them — as well as he can do them 
in the time, and with the strength, that 
more important concerns permit him to 
spare to them. The trouble with inter- 
collegiate athletics, and especially with 
football, about which there is the most 
complaint, has been this mistaken over- 
urgency of nearly all the colleges to do 
them as well as they possibly could, re- 
gardless of the claims of matters more 
important. 

[9] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

Take, for example, a college of notable 
distinction in sports, which has not been 
content to be in intercollegiate athletics 
merely for her health and incidental glory, 
but has thought it very important to be 
pre-eminent, and to that end has put her 
mind to excellent purpose in the work of 
organizing victory. Feeling that what- 
ever she did was worth doing as well as 
she could, she has done her very best in 
athletics, and with magnificent results so 
far as winning goes. Not much sound 
complaint can be made about her methods 
— which are admirably effective — except 
perhaps this general one — if even this is 
sound — that she has, perhaps, been will- 
ing to pay more for success in athletics 
than it was worth, and has constrained the 
colleges that competed with her to pay, if 
they could, the same price that she did, 
under penalty of being beaten nine-tenths 
of the time. 

I don't know that any of her competi- 

[10] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

tors except one has ever shown any special 
reluctance to pay anything possible for 
athletic success, but one of them in a half- 
hearted way has hung back with some 
obstinacy from paying the price of vic- 
tory. This one has not wanted profes- 
sional coaches, nor unduly protracted 
periods of preparation. She has wanted 
to take sport a little easier, spread it out 
a little thinner and wider, keep it on a 
lower level of execution more compatible 
with other interests, and try to get more 
fun out of it and more out-door exercise 
for more people. She has tried to get her 
chief competitor to see sport in the light 
that she did, and play with her on easier 
terms, but has not been able to get her 
preferences in these particulars respected. 
For the rival has gone straight on, getting 
better and better instruction for her oars- 
men and football players, hiring such 
coaches or trainers as she needed to hire 
and drafting those worth drafting, and 
[11] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

making the avocation of the university 
athlete more and more important and 
exacting and less and less reconcilable to 
the due development of his vocation as a 
student and the rounding out of his 
human nature. Of course in all the col- 
leges the athletic avocation tends, among 
the leading athletes, to overtop and over- 
shadow their vocation as students. No 
one college is to blame for that, but every 
college is to blame, in proportion as its 
influence in athletic matters has been 
potent and far-reaching, which has 
steadily made it harder to keep inter- 
collegiate sport in its proper place. It 
sounds like flubdub to say that if this or 
that college, in her athletic methods, had 
been somewhat more slack it would have 
been better for her and for all the colleges 
that compete with her. May be it is 
flubdub. Yet something like that must 
be the complaint if there is to be a com- 
plaint. The victories of the leaders in 

[121 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

the current intercollegiate contests are 
won by the brains of graduates and hired 
men, and by the same means must be 
won any victories that are won by colleges 
that compete with them. Unaided, or 
slightly aided, undergraduates cannot win 
in the greater intercollegiate competitions 
of the present day. A football team, or a 
crew that is to compete on equal terms 
with the leading teams and crews, must 
have the longest and most exacting train- 
ing compatible with the necessary mini- 
mum of college work and the uncontroll- 
able idiosyncrasies of the North American 
climate, and must be directed in it by 
masters of such work, who give to it all 
the time that can be advantageously em- 
ployed in it, let their other duties be what 
they may. If intercollegiate contests on 
these terms cost too much; if the strain 
of them is un wholesomely great on every- 
body concerned in them; if the damage 
they do to scholarship and the mental and 

[13] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

social side of education is not offset by 
the good they do to the moral and physical 
side of it; if, finally, they exact too great 
a sacrifice of time and energy from the 
students who take the leading part in 
them and who in some cases are virtually 
compelled to take it, then we may perhaps 
be warranted in feeling that intercollegiate 
athletics is suffering from some redund- 
ancy of success. 

Take another case. 

If a politician cannot achieve popularity 
he might as well go out of business. His 
power, for good or bad, depends upon his 
ability to win the liking and the confi- 
dence of the voters. If the voters don't 
know him, don't like him, and don't pre- 
fer him to somebody else, he cannot, in 
this country, go far on the road toward 
political preferment. If he aspires to 
high place, extended power, and great 
opportunities for public service or the 

[141 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

gratification of his desires, he must make 
himself known to multitudes of people, 
and make them like him. That is the 
rule for all politicians, good or bad; for 
Lincoln or for Tweed; for Roosevelt or 
for Ruef . They are all aspirants for pub- 
lic favour, and they cannot go far or do 
much unless they get it. 

No American in recent times, if ever, 
has won the public favour to the extent 
that an eminent contemporary statesman 
had won it two years ago. No American 
in ofiice was ever so popular as he was 
then. How did he do it.^^ Undoubt- 
edly he made a business of it, but it was 
a business for which he was remarkably 
qualified, and to which he applied himself 
with astonishing energy. His greatest 
single qualification for the job of making 
people like him was his great ability to 
like them. He is a very warm-hearted 
man, with the instinct to please, an enthu- 
siasm for generous and noble ideals, and 

[15] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

an extremely active, interesting mind 
with which to work upon the minds of 
others. His sympathies are very ready, 
and he has an unquestionable zeal to do 
the public the greatest service he can and 
put to rights everything that needs it. 
His method of practising the popular arts 
was, chiefly, to let himself out and be- 
have according to his natural impulses. 
There was plenty of press-agent and bill- 
board work about his remarkable military 
career, but it was voluntary work, con- 
tributed gratis by the newspaper corre- 
spondents and bill-stickers, rejoicing to 
push along a good thing. Of course, in 
certain particulars the luck went mar- 
vellously his way, but when Fortune's 
favours dropped in his arms, he never 
fumbled them, but dealt with them ac- 
cording to the impulses of his heart and 
the admonitions of his wits. The result 
was the accumulation of an all but bound- 
less popularity, based very largely on 

[16] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

sound reasons, and remarkably solid and 
durable, considering the rapidity of its 
growth. The trouble with it has been, 
not that it was too great to last, for it has 
lasted surprisingly, but that the enor- 
mous influence that it brought him, joined 
to the authority of office, gave him more 
power than he could handle wisely, and 
deprived him of checks that should have 
limited its use. Public opinion can re- 
strain any officer of government, but it 
has been until recently of very little use as 
a brake to this one because he has con- 
trolled it, his popularity being so over- 
whelming as to make even reasonable op- 
position and reasonable criticism disas- 
trously unsafe for members of his own 
party, and futile in any one else. 

Besides that, popularity is a thing with 
a vast appetite that demands constant 
feeding. It is an instinct with most of us 
human creatures to hold what we have 
got, and try to add to it. We like to keep 

[171 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

on rolling our snowballs, and we look to 
see where there is the most snow. There 
is a popular and disgusting maxim — dis- 
gusting because there is so much truth in 
it — ^that there is no such thing in affairs 
as standing still, and that when we cease 
to gain we begin to lose. It is that, in 
great measure, that keeps a great money- 
maker continually on the reach after more 
gains long after he has got enough; that 
that makes a college that has established 
the habit of winning in athletics look upon 
defeat as an unbearable calamity; that 
that makes a statesman contrive policies 
and press measures, to hold his following. 
A general is bound to feed his army till he 
finishes the campaign. This statesman 
we have in mind, to fulfill his aims, had to 
feed his popularity, and fed it finally so 
many burning words and urgent purposes 
and autocratic actions that a very respect- 
able and conservative element in the popu- 
lation came to be afraid of him, and to be 

[181 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

solicitous that when his strenuous hands 
let go of the Republican sceptre it should 
pass to some milder man without so much 
reputation to maintain. It seems argu- 
able, therefore, that he succeeded more 
than was profitable in the work of gaining 
popularity, since he got so much that it 
strained his resources to feed it, and made 
thoughtful and friendly observers fear the 
consequences of its continuing to be fed. 
And it blinded him a little, too, making 
him feel that he must be right in almost 
everything he did, because the people 
were with him in such overwhelming 
majority. But they were with him, not 
because everything he did was wise, but 
because they believed in him and trusted 
in his character. For the people are 
pretty sound judges of character, but in 
their estimate of the wisdom of measures 
and the expediency and timeliness of 
means they are a very untrustworthy 
guide. 

[19] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

Happily for him, and for his fame, and 
for the country, he had the remarkable 
sagacity to put an absolute limit, by a 
timely declaration, to his servitude to his 
own popularity. His notice given, in 
good season and in convincing form, of 
his purpose not to be again a candidate 
for the office he holds, was notice of a 
clear and final determination not to sacri- 
fice the gains and the hopes of a remark- 
able success in living to any glamour of a 
possibly unprecedented success in life. 

Too much success is that which is 
gained by the sacrifice of something worth 
more than itself. The great objection to 
it, outside of its own undesirableness, is 
that it disturbs the balance of things. It 
is unstable, impermanent, the exploit of 
imperfectly civilized people, carrying in 
itself the seeds of its own dissolution. If 
we are wise we shall not wish to tie up to 
it, nor to see our children allied with its 

[201 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

exponents. Examples of it abound in 
history and in contemporary life. The 
Slave Power succeeded too much; the 
Tariff has succeeded too much. 

Instances are very common of men who 
succeed too much in business or in specu- 
lation, lose their sagacity of judgment and 
come to crashing discomfiture. For all 
considerable success is a trial of char- 
acter, and has its danger-point, where the 
job begins to want to own the man. 

The great, effectual remedy for dangers 
of that sort is the practice of the golden 
rule, and the resolute shifting of one's 
labours from self-aggrandizement and 
selfish accumulation to the service of 
society. The men who have it in them to 
succeed too much are the ones whose 
labours it is most important to divert be- 
times from private concerns to the huge 
task of keeping order and prosperity in 
the world. 

Is it a propensity that is peculiarly 

[21] 



TOO MUCH SUCCESS 

American, I wonder, this propensity to 
succeed too much ? The examples of it 
that have been submitted above are 
typical American examples. Is it some- 
thing in the air we breathe here that par- 
tially disqualifies some of our natural 
winners from knowing when they have 
won enough ? Is it that our society is so 
restless and so rapacious that profitable 
living in it is too hard to achieve, and we 
are constrained to find such a substitute 
as we can for it in the headlong pursuit of 
success in life? Do our dratted wheels 
turn too fast and wear us out with half 
futile revolutions ? Sometimes it seems 
so. Certainly it seems true — true for in- 
dividuals and still more conspicuously 
and incontestibly true for a people — that 
success in life is mainly valuable as it leads 
to, or makes possible, success in living. 

March, 1908 



22 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNC- 
TIONS 

ToMLiNSON used to say he had all the 
proclivities and all the compunctions. He 
expressed a sense of obligation to his com- 
punctions for keeping him out of jail and 
the electric chair and other objectionable 
depositories, but he suspected that they 
had been an obstacle to attainment. A 
man with all the proclivities, no com- 
punctions, and a sound and skilful legal 
adviser, seemed to him to be in a bet- 
ter case to achieve a large harvest and 
interesting adventures than his own con- 
flicting endowment had ever permitted 
him to command. But he did not re- 
pine. He recognized the value of his pro- 
clivities as so many molecules of energy, 
so many incentives to action, but it was 

[231 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

his compunctions that he respected and 
valued and was proud of. Some things 
that he had done he was thankful to have 
done, but not so thankful — no, not nearly 
— as that he had not done some things 
that his compunctions had deterred him 
from doing. 

Of late, hereabouts, the development 
of judicious compunctions has seemed 
to be the thing that most of all was in 
particular request. Nobody accuses us 
Americans of deficient activity. It is 
conceded that we strive in the fashion 
of those who expect to prevail. The fault 
we are used to be charged with is not 
laziness, but that the urgency of various 
of our aspirations has outrun the restraints 
reasonably proper to the stage of civiliza- 
tion which we are understood to have 
attained. Sad to say, the European cari- 
caturists no longer use the eagle to per- 
sonify our nation, but the hog. Now 
that the times have turned bad on us, the 

[24] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

general reason given and accepted for it 
is that we have been too eager to get and 
to spend, and not sufficiently provided 
with compunctions about how we did it. 
No doubt, as far as it goes, that is a true 
enough reason, especially if we under- 
stand **true," as Dr. William James does, 
to be *'the term applied to whatever is 
practically profitable for us to believe." 
There is fairly good authority that it is 
practically profitable for us to acknowl- 
edge every day that we are miserable 
sinners, and especially in the last four 
years there has been increasing need for 
us to keep our compunctions well up to 
their work. As happens when things go 
well for successive years, we were all get- 
ting so extravagant and so appreciative 
of material blessings that it may sadly be 
admitted that perhaps we really did need 
to be brought up with a round turn, and 
to remember what the catechism says is 
the chief end of Presbyterian man, and to 

[25] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

consider the cost of things as compared 
with their real worth to us. We did need 
a great development of compunctions, 
some, each of us felt, for his own use, but 
more for the use of others, whose need 
of them, in our judgment, was more 
pressing. 

But, after all, a nation cannot live on 
compunctions alone. We have developed 
a great store of them, and yet we are 
not entirely happy. Compunctions, pre- 
cious as they are, cannot do business all 
by themselves. If their work is to be 
wholesome and beneficial they must have 
proclivities to combine with. No doubt 
liberty is better than meat, but they go 
well together. Why not have both, if 
possible, or at any rate let folks choose 
as far as they may which they prefer. 

There is something like an irrepressible 
conflict between meat and liberty. If 
everybody was all for liberty, there 
wouldn't be enough meat raised to go 

[26] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

around. Most kinds of work that estab- 
lish a claim for wages involve a consider- 
able abridgment of freedom. We are 
paid for slaving for our fellows, and the 
more meat we require or covet, the larger, 
as a rule, is the share of freedom that we 
must forego. So, if everybody was all 
for meat and ready to make any sacrifice 
of freedom to get it, the supply of free- 
dom would be pretty sure to dwindle. In 
fat years, like those lately experienced, 
meat gets the start of freedom. In lean 
years like this freedom clamours for its 
own, and does what it may to catch up. 

So it is with the conflict of the pro- 
clivities and the compunctions. For 
years together the proclivities have had 
the best of it, have eaten and drunk, 
hired lawyers, watered stocks, bought 
legislation, given rebates, filled the sea 
with yachts and the land with auto- 
mobiles, and waxed very fat. Now the 
compunctions have the upper hand again, 

[27] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

and have got the poor proclivities driven 
into a corner and fighting for their lives, 
so that we begin to have for them the 
sort of compassion that is always ready 
to succour the under dog. After all, we 
must remember that the proclivities are 
the dog, and the compunctions, lively 
and useful as they may be, are only the 
fleas. They are good to bite the dog, 
who often needs biting; but destroy the 
dog, and they will be homeless and of 
no use but to train and exhibit if any one 
has the patience for the job or the money 
to pay admission. If we are to preserve 
the compunctions and provide useful 
employment for them, we must save the 
proclivities alive. 

A good, fat railroad, for instance, 
crowded with traffic and dripping securi- 
ties at every mile, is worth biting. It 
will keep a little army of compunctions 
in steady nourishment and active in their 
calling. So will a great, domineering 

[28] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

trust or a grandiose insurance company 
that does great things in a grand way. 
But when receiverships come, compunc- 
tions grow lean and listless. Fleas leave 
a dead dog, don't they.? What do the 
nature-fakers tell us about that.? At 
any rate, be on the safe side, and keep 
the dog alive, if only for the sake of the 
fleas. 

Let us gather, then, such indulgent 
and extenuating thoughts as we may 
about the proclivities, to the end that 
they may be left alive, and that all com- 
punctions may not perish off the earth 
for lack of something nourishing to bite. 
Take the proclivities at their worst, and 
there will seem not to be one of them 
that should hope to be saved. That great 
proclivity, turbulent and unruly, that 
makes for the perpetuation of the species 
— what hob it raises ! Take up any news- 
paper and read its criminal record, going 
on day after day, age after age, leaving 

[29] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

more or less of murder, insanity, suicide, 
and misery in its wake. Why do we 
tolerate it? Only because of our in- 
stinctive conviction that it is convenient 
for us that we should. There have always 
been sects and ind;ividuals that didn't, 
but the mass of mankind always look on 
the bright side of that proclivity and find 
saving and indispensable graces and val- 
ues in it. The price of an unreplenished 
earth has always seemed to the mass of 
mankind too great to pay for a possible 
gain in human deportment, so that mo- 
mentous proclivity has held its own in the 
face of vast resulting inconvenience, and, 
at times, of religious discouragement and 
of irksome religious condescension. The 
verdict of the thoughtful upon it has been 
that, duly geared to suitable compunc- 
tions, it was amply worthy of the hos- 
pitality of mankind; but so far its enjoy- 
ment of that hospitality has never been 
dependent upon any verdict. It has 

[30] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

claimed its own in war and peace, in good 
times and bad, and the effort of the wise 
has merely been to keep its due cohort 
of compunctions on their job. 

And there is the great fighting pro- 
clivity, so little to be extolled for its own 
sake, but, so far in the world's history, 
so inexorable in its exactions. Over 
against it stand not only most of the 
compunctions, but most of the other 
proclivities. So enormously wasteful it 
is, so brutal, so incompatible apparently 
with most things that men want — with 
progress, with civilization. Yet there it 
sticks, head down and stubborn, ready to 
claim its rights when events are ready. 
It has few friends; religion — our religion 
— is against its ideals, and perpetually 
tempers and softens it. Distress and 
grief and want follow its greater out- 
bursts. And yet it is respected. The 
nations chain it up, but they dare not 
neglect to feed it. Destruction and sal- 

[311 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

vation being apparently bound up to- 
gether in it, it may not be suffered to 
perish until the fulness of some time, 
appointed possibly, but not yet disclosed. 
Hard holds mankind, too, to the pro- 
clivity to eat and drink, and to be merry 
at times, using what the earth produces 
with such discretion as experience affords. 
The adjustment of compunctions and 
prohibitions to this proclivity has become 
in itself an important branch of human 
endeavour. Men, women, and societies 
devote themselves to it with persistent 
fervour, accomplishing a vast deal that is 
valuable, but a good deal also that is not. 
Enthusiastic professors expound to us 
that we consume food in enormous excess 
of our reasonable needs, and perhaps we 
do, but we find eating a pleasant exercise 
and stick to it, according to our various 
capacities, as long as we can get food that 
suits us and our digestions hold out. As 
for drink, the habit of using beverages 

[32] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUXCTIOXS 

that are more or less stimulating in their 
qualities is at least as old as history, and 
doubtless very much older. Coeval with 
it have been perception of its hazards 
and warnings against its continuance. 
Hardly any major proclivity has such a 
bad name, or is battered by such a fusil- 
lade of arguments and awful examples. 
That rum does any one any good must 
seem doubtful even to its best friend. 
When you have said that it is pleasant, 
and that though it is immensely destruc- 
tive to some savages and to crowds of 
civilized individuals, a considerable pro- 
portion of the most valuable people on 
the earth seem to be able to play with it 
without serious damage to themselves, 
you have said almost all that it is safe to 
aver. So great a cloud of compunctions 
swarm over that proclivity that you mar- 
vel that there is any life left in it. They 
do keep down some of its vigour, so that 
it is less destructive than it used to be, 

[33] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

and probably they hope in time to kill it 
altogether. One could wish that they 
might succeed and that it might stay 
dead for a generation or two, till we 
could find out whether the world was 
better or worse without it. But it is 
not being killed. The army of com- 
punctions it maintains is evidence of its 
enormous vitality. To all seeming, so 
long as the earth continues to spin there 
are likely to be cakes on it, and also ale, 
but with great improvement probably by 
the human race in the wise use of both. 

Finally, consider the proclivity for 
getting rich which critics throw at us, 
and we throw at one another, as the 
great blemish in our national character. 
If there were not such venerable and 
respected authority for believing that the 
love of money is the root of all evil, the 
cursory observer might easily imagine 
that it was the root of all good. We 
Americans need a vast deal of money. 

[34] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

We have a very large family, including 
a raft of adopted children, to look after 
and educate and start in life. Our 
grounds are very extensive; our tastes 
are expensive; it is a matter of appalling 
expenditure merely to keep us going from 
year to year, let alone what we may need 
to expand our experiences of life. And 
how are we going to get so much money ? 
Have our forebears earned it and laid it 
up for us ? No, not to any adequate ex- 
tent. We have to get most of it our- 
selves from year to year. Perhaps we 
have some co-operative method of money- 
getting — all to work as they like, and 
all share alike ? No ; just the old way. 
Everybody to hustle around in working 
hours and get what he can, and keep 
what he can after swapping what he must 
for necessaries, and what he will for 
luxuries. It is on the individual money- 
getting proclivity, then, that we must 
depend for all the necessaries, comforts, 

[35] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

enlargements, and benevolences that be- 
long to prosperity. Let us be thankful 
that that proclivity is strong; strong 
enough in some of us to make up for 
the lack of it in others; strong enough 
to endure jeers, flout ings, and discourage- 
ments, the cloutings of envy, the hin- 
drances of folly, and all the valuable and 
necessary compunctions of philosophy 
and virtue. There must be hobbles 
handy for this proclivity, as for all the 
others, for sometimes it needs slowing 
up. Individuals have it to violent excess, 
and have to be restrained and take treat- 
ment, as happens with the others, too. 
When we shed all our material vestments 
and go to glory, we shall doubtless get 
on w^ell without it. But meanwhile it is 
one of the great basic proclivities in which 
civilization and progress have their roots. 
Duly disciplined, penetrated with intelli- 
gence and geared with brotherliness, it is a 
great national property, a keeper of peace, 

[36] 



PROCLIVITIES AND COMPUNCTIONS 

and a great discoverer and distributer of 
knowledge. Let us not try too hard to 
root it out of our make-up, nor be un- 
duly ashamed of it, even though Europe, 
in the temporary eclipse of our powers 
of disbursement, does make that jeering 
substitution of the hog for the eagle. 

June, 1908. 



[37] 



READING 

There is a pretty general complaint 
about the contemporary American reader 
that he does not read as good books as he 
should. The publishers keep testing his 
mind's appetite, and report with practical 
unanimity that he likes a pretty light diet. 
If the publishers can find some one who 
can write an acceptable story, they can 
promise to find readers for it — for some 
stories a great many readers — but for any 
harder and more difficult and informing 
sort of literature, whatever its merit, they 
are modest in their anticipations. We 
hear it said that for new books of the more 
substantial sort — histories, memoirs, trav- 
els, and the like — our eighty millions of 
population does not yet provide so sure a 
market as the thirty millions of Great 

[381 



READING 

Britain. The habit of reading the more 
substantial books seems to have taken 
hold of a much larger proportion of the 
people of the British Isles than of us 
Americans. And even that is not all. 
We seem not to be gaining the habit, 
for the proportion of light reading in 
the current mass of new literature seems 
to be increasing. 

Why that is, and whether it is a tem- 
porary condition or something more seri- 
ous, is matter for discussion. I suspect 
it is one of the habitual complaints of 
literate mankind that the readers of the 
generation just passed read better books 
than those of the generations in being. 
It is no fault of the publishers, for there 
are plenty of publishers who are eager 
to print the best books they can hope to 
sell. They won't print many books that 
no one will buy, because such a practice 
as that, if it became habitual, would be 
incompatible with continuance in the 

[39] 



READING 

publishing business. But they have an 
interest, which is more than a mere 
pecuniary interest, in what they publish, 
and would much rather find their neces- 
sary profit in a book that they can be 
proud of than in one which can never 
do credit to their name, however much 
it may help their pocket. 

Probably the case of the readers is not 
so bad as it seems from the mere fact 
that everything but fiction is hard to sell. 
The competition of the magazines and 
newspapers with books for the attention 
of readers is much fiercer in this genera- 
tion than it ever was before. Periodicals 
are read enormously, and are the chief 
support of the best writers of the day, 
and in them fragments, at least, of many 
of the solider new books make a pre- 
liminary appearance, along with nearly 
all the best new stories and novels. 

To be sure, the more substantial new 
books are in competition with all the 

[40] 



READING 

great books that ever were printed. If 
readers neglected the good new books in 
order to read the good old ones, we might 
regret it as something detrimental to the 
book-publishing business and the interests 
of living authors, but we would not find 
in it a sign of decaying culture or degen- 
erating taste. But it is not the compe- 
tition of the old books that limits atten^ 
tion to new ones, for whoever has learned 
to read the one is by so much the likelier 
to read the other. Who has the habit of 
good reading and the appetite for it will 
read what suits his appetite if he can get 
it. The trouble is that the appetite is 
not oftener formed. 

If you are to make a silk purse, you 
must have the silk. You cannot make a 
reader of good books out of any human 
material that comes along. You must 
catch a mind proper for the job. Not 
all good minds are adapted to much read- 
ing. You find very able people who read 

[411 



READING 

few books, and mostly trash, and people 
of less ability who read more, and much 
better ones. You find also interesting 
differences in the facility with which dif- 
ferent people take in the sense of printed 
words. Some people from childhood 
read very much faster and with less effort 
than others. Their eyes seem to connect 
quicker with their brains, and their per- 
ception of words and rows of words is 
almost instantaneous. Other people never 
entirely get past the need of pronounc- 
ing, mentally, each word. They must 
hear the word in their minds, if not act- 
ually with their ears, before they can 
fully take it in, whereas the quicker 
(visual) readers get the sense of it by 
processes so rapid that they are not dis- 
tinguishable as processes at all. The 
slow readers read fewer books, but not 
necessarily either better or worse ones. 

There are great differences, too, in the 
mental energy of different people, and in 

[42] 



READING 

the directions in which it expends itself; 
and there is as much idiosyncrasy about 
the diet that different minds require as 
in what suits different stomachs. There 
are minds that are fed, soothed, and re- 
animated by music, others by conversa- 
tion, others by reading. Not that ordi- 
narily there is anything incompatible 
about these three means of mental re- 
freshment, with all of which most of us 
deal more or less; but in any individual 
any one of them may be developed at 
the cost of the others, or any two to the 
restriction of the third. If only some- 
how your mind is fed, and your wits 
have good substance to work on, it mat- 
ters not greatly how or whence it is fed. 
There is no intrinsic merit in merely 
reading books — even good books. What 
matters is what you get out of them. 
For most educated people they are the 
easiest and surest road to knowledge, the 
most accessible and unfailing fountain 

[43] 



READING 

of inspiration, the restfulest resort and 
the most available entertainment. But 
their place in the world is along with 
the tools, the bread, the meat, and the 
powder — things indispensable, or near it, 
to civilization, but things only useful 
to those who have use for them and can 
use them, and only valuable when used 
to good purpose. 

To read more than one can digest and 
turn into energy or reserve power is not 
much better than to eat more than can 
readily be managed, or than the body 
requires. There are habits of excessive 
reading that rank — hardly with excessive 
gambling or drinking, for they are not 
so destructive — but well up in the list 
of the self-indulgent bad habits, like ex- 
cessive smoking, that help lazy people to 
neglect their reasonable duties with com- 
fort and no loss of self-esteem. 

Nevertheless, so great and honourable 
has come to be the reputation of books 

[44] 



READING 

and book learning that it is, prima facie, 
a reproach to any modern person of fair 
opportunities to have it said with truth 
that he never reads a book that is worth 
reading. It leaves him in a posture that 
requires explanation if not excuse. If 
it appears that his daily energies are so 
engrossed by his daily labours that he has 
no energy left for any reading that re- 
quires energy, that explanation will be 
understood. If it appears that his mind 
is fed by observation and by the constant 
impact of other minds, and thoroughly 
exercised in making decisions and the 
solving of hard problems, that, too, will 
be understood. In spite of exceptions, 
men extremely active in affairs — fortune- 
builders, projectors of great enterprises — 
are seldom large readers of books. The 
best readers, naturally, are people of more 
leisure, and especially the young and the 
old; for it is before we get into the rush- 
ing current of life's employments, and 

[45] 



READmG 

after we have begun to emerge from it, 
that most of us working people have most 
leisure to read. What we read in our age 
matters not so very much, if only we like 
it and it keeps us happy ; but we are very 
fortunate indeed if we can get to know 
good books and something of what is in 
them while we are still young. That is 
like storing corn in our granaries and 
gasoline in our tanks: we go so much the 
better for it when we get on the road. 

And so I find it a matter of very gen- 
eral solicitude with parents to find some 
means of inducing their children to read 
improving books while they have the 
chance. I don't find many parents whose 
success in this endeavour matches their 
efforts or their hopes. Bookcases with 
glass doors and monotonous looking sets 
of books behind them are comparatively 
common in American drawing-rooms, but 
tolerably well-stocked libraries are com- 
paratively scarce. Of course you may 

[46] 



READING 

lead a child to a library, and even leave 
him there, and not be able to make him 
read; but he is more likely to read a 
library than he is to read the parlour book- 
case, especially if the bookcase is locked 
because the books in it are so nicely 
bound. Familiarity with books — even 
if only with the backs of them — seldom 
breeds contempt. It is much more apt to 
breed friendship, and sometimes it breeds 
strong affection like that for dear people. 
But to constrain a young person to 
read what his elders consider profitable 
to him is pretty uphill work. It is a 
case in which leading gives better results 
than driving. The indispensable pre- 
liminary is to create an appetite for 
knowledge, or at least an active realiza- 
tion of the need to know something that 
the better sort of books contain. The 
readiest means of exciting such an ap- 
petite in the young is by conversation. 
If children are used to hear good talk — 

[47] 



READING 

talk that has knowledge behind it, and 
that is concerned with matters really 
worth talking about — ^they may come to 
understand why it is worth while to know 
something, and how a fair and growing 
store of book knowledge helps to equip 
them with opinions and means of com- 
parison, and to make their ideas about 
things interesting to others, and the ideas 
of other qualified people interesting to 
them. What chiefly determines the scope 
and quality of our talk is what we know, 
and what seems to be known by the per- 
son we are talking with. Children that 
grow up in families where the talk is gen- 
erously flavoured with acquired knowl- 
edge not only pick up a great deal of 
knowledge from what they hear, but are 
likely — or at least liable — to develop an 
appetite for more, and to go to books 
to satisfy it. But the talk, to have that 
result, must be interesting, and of course 
talk is not necessarily interesting because 

[481 



READING 

it is bookish. The bookish talk of some 
bookish people is as dull and unprofitable 
as talk can well be, and not to be com- 
pared with the gossip of a lively observer 
who simply skims the newspapers and 
takes habitual notice of what is going on. 

The newspaper, which becomes a book 
if you think of its annual yield bound 
up between covers, is in our day the 
greatest and most indispensable book of 
all ; but it should be read with vigour and 
discrimination, and it should be a stim- 
ulant to other reading and not a sub- 
stitute for it. For the young it is not 
essential. The obligation to be up with 
the times does not belong to youth. The 
duty of that part of life is to acquire 
foundations for intelligent thought to 
rest upon, but when the foundations are 
laid the newspaper is a great purveyor of 
material for the superstructure. 

The enormous dimensions of the mass 
of human knowledge as contained in 

[49] 



READING 

books is liable to daunt young readers, 
and discourage them from even nibbling 
at so huge a cake. The long books are 
so long, and there are so many of them, 
and life, all told, is but a span! Help 
the young readers to a release from that 
burdensome feeling and to appreciation 
of the truer sentiment that a good book 
is the record of the thoughts of a good 
mind, and that whether one reads much 
or little of it, contact with the mind that 
made it is profitable. For though one 
aim of reading is to gather facts and add 
to knowledge, its greater use is to teach 
us to think. Knowledge is like the ore 
in a great mine, for there is no end to 
it, and each of us gets out what he can, 
and smelts it as best he can to get the 
good out of it. But wisdom comes more 
like a nugget, and so much of it as we 
are lucky enough to find is ready for use. 
Experience of life adds greatly to the 
interest of some classes of books — history 

[50] 



READING 

and biography especially. Even a good 
newspaper reader, after twenty or thirty 
years of it, comes to have knowledge of 
his own historical period at least, and 
is bound to have reflected upon politics 
and problems of government, religion, 
social experiments, and the great topics 
that concern civilized life. It will in- 
terest him to piece out what he remem- 
bers, or half remembers, with what he 
finds in books that are concerned with 
his own time, or the time immediately 
preceding it, and to compare politics as 
he knows them with politics as they have 
been in the past. All history being a 
record of what men have done, the better 
we know men and understand the springs 
of human action, the more interesting it 
is to know how men have thought and 
acted in times past. Plutarch's men seem 
very far away when we read about them 
in early life, and get no nearer from com- 
paring them with one another. But it 

[51] 



READING 



makes a difference when in ma'turer years 
we compare Csesar, not with Alexander, 
but, out of our own heads and memories, 
with General Lee or General Grant. 



[52] 



WRITING 

Perhaps the practised reader who has 
learned how, can read so that you forget 
that he is reading, and take his words as 
though they came popping at you fresh 
from the mind that thought them; but 
with most of us it happens that the instant 
we proceed from talk into reading there 
comes a change in the quality of our in- 
tonations. It is not our talk any longer, 
but some one else's, of which we are the 
mouthpiece. 

A subtle distinction very like this dif- 
ference between talk that is talked and 
talk that is read is apt to obtain between 
talk and writing. Most of us, when we 
undertake to write anything, instinctively 
assume, as our pen comes out of the ink- 
pot, a tone a little different from our 
natural tone of voice. Practice of the 

[53] 



WRITING 

right kind tends to obliterate this differ- 
ence, and to make the writer's writing 
more like good talk, and, incidentally, to 
make his talk more like good writing. 
It is not a bad thing for a man to talk 
like a book, provided it is exactly the 
right sort of book and he doesn't talk 
like too much of it at once. It is high 
praise for some kinds of writing to say 
that it reads like oral speech, but it won't 
be good writing unless the talk it sounds 
like is very good talk. In good writing 
there is the sound of the writer's voice. 
Surely Milton's living voice is in his prose, 
and Ruskin's voice in Ruskin's prose, 
and another voice in Hawthorne's, and 
another in Newman's, and another in 
Thackeray's. Style is not an arbitrary 
thing. It is personal. It has a different 
tone in every writer, just as the living 
voice and enunciation is different in each 
person, and no two painters paint alike. 
Style regards words as sounds, and puts 

[54] 



WRITING 

them together so that they sound well. 
To reconcile them to grammar is not dif- 
ficult. To observe how alliterations and 
assonances enter into style is analytically 
interesting, but of no practical value in 
writing. The ear attends to those details. 
It is wonderful what subtleties of tone, 
of feeling, of sentiment, of emotion, can 
be put into written words, and into very 
common little words at that. Provided 
you know something — not so very much 
— about how to use them, words seem to 
hold just what you intrust to them, both 
the sense and the spirit, and keep it to 
show to any pair of eyes that comes 
looking for it, and have a discerning and 
sympathetic mind behind them. You put 
tears into your words, and the sympa- 
thetic reader will snuffle when he comes 
to them, but you must have snuffled first 
yourself; put in a smile, and he will 
smile; catch your spirit at a moment of 
exaltation or of strong emotion and capt- 

[55] 



WRITING 

ure its message with a pencil — there it 
will be alive and inspiring for whoever 
reads it with competent eyes. 

A great charm about writing is the 
possibility of writing better than you 
know; of getting hold of better thoughts 
than you are fairly entitled to think, or 
do think, as a rule, and putting them 
into words of unsuspected felicity. But 
you must think the thoughts for the 
moment. You can't put down what you 
never had, but you can put down what 
you had and lost. 

Most of us are uneven in our mental 
processes. We don't think big thoughts 
all the time. We think them under press- 
ure of strong emotions or of fortunate 
physical conditions. Even when there is 
no special occasion to inspire a thought 
that is better than common, it will often 
come as the result of concentration of the 
mind, conscious or unconscious, on some 
particular subject. The mind's auto- 

[56] 



WRITING 

matic action is a very important phase of 
its activities. It keeps going all the time, 
and strikes a good many sparks on its 
own hook. Once a good mind has been 
headed on a certain course, it is apt to 
hold that course more or less closely, or at 
least to revert to it, until it arrives some- 
where; and this it will often do whether 
its owner keeps his watch at the wheel 
or not. I think that most writers, when 
they have got some particularly good idea 
into some particularly lucid and effective 
form of words, often feel that the job 
is only partly of their doing, and that 
a good deal of it, and probably the very 
best of it, came to them by processes 
more or less independent of their volition. 
Nobody writes without putting his will 
into the work and making the indispen- 
sable effort, but what comes is partly 
what is in him, and partly what is given 
him to say, and which is which he may 
not know, nor whence came what was 

[57] 



WRITING 

given. What we call literary talent, or, 
in its rarer and more remarkable form, 
genius, seems to be the gift of having 
extra good ideas come into the mind, 
and clothe themselves with extra good 
language. Very young writers have 
sometimes powers of expression which 
persons less lucky never get. There is an 
ear for language like the ear for music, 
and akin to it. Girls of the most limited 
experience and youths of inadequate ed- 
ucation seem now and then to possess 
by instinct the faculty of expression; of 
putting their words where they ought to go, 
and doing the trick that makes literature. 
It is a great advantage to a writer to 
have sense, but he can get along with a 
moderate supply of it if only he is a good 
enough writer. It is an advantage to 
him to have learning, provided he has it 
under good control and doesn't let it 
run away with him or dam him up. But 
the thing he must have is ideas. It is 

[58] 



WRITING 

hard sledding for a writer to get along 
without ideas. Somehow, if he is going 
to be a writer, he must have bubbles in 
his mind. He can borrow a great many 
thoughts if he knows where to find them. 
What is learning but the assimilation 
of other men's ideas! But while some 
persons are writers because they are pos- 
sessed with ideas that demand to be ex- 
pounded, a good many others attain 
more or less painfully to the possession 
of ideas because they are called to be 
writers and are peremptorily constrained 
to have something to impart. It isn't 
quite enough to have language, though 
if you know enough words and attain to 
a truly skilful use of them, you can make 
them go a good ways. You must have 
some kind of an idea to string them on 
if you are going to make a tolerable 
literary job. Sit down with pen, paper, 
ink, and a dictionary — if you need one. 
Then we all know what happens. You 

[59] 



WRITING 

have got to think. There is no way out 
of it. Thinking is to the natural man 
a severe and repugnant exercise, but the 
natural man is not a writer. Before 
anybody becomes a writer he must sub- 
jugate nature to the extent of partially 
overcoming his distaste for consecutive 
thought. I dare say it is a healthy dis- 
taste. I think the subjugation can be 
overcome, especially if the writer aspires 
to have many readers. If a writer thinks 
too fluently and exhaustively, even though 
he thinks well, he is liable to tire his 
reader out biefore he lets go himself. 
And when a reader is thoroughly tired 
he quits. That is his privilege, and that 
is one of the writer's risks that he must 
consider. If you sit under a speaker, 
you must often sit him out whether he 
thinks too exhaustively for you or not, 
but a writer can hardly put any one to 
so much inconvenience as that. If his 
thought is too protracted or doesn't strike 

[60] 



WRITING 

you as edifying, you can shut him ojff in 
the middle of a sentence, without any 
lapse of manners or offense to any one. 
A man who has been a fairly successful 
writer for a good many years has been 
heard to attribute his success to the ex- 
ceptionally feeble quality of his mind, 
which brought it about that he always 
got tired of any line of thought he was 
expounding before the reader did. There 
is something in that idea, though pre- 
sumably that was not the whole story, 
but the same instinct that saves a talker 
from being a bore must save a writer 
from being the same. The proper aim 
of writers, however, is not so much to 
relieve the reader from the trouble of as- 
similating thoughts as to put the thought 
to him so skilfully, so concisely, in such 
an orderly way, and with such felicities 
of illustration and diction, that he will 
take it in gladly and without too much 
consciousness of effort. 

[61] 



WRITING 

I don't mean to say that it should be 
the chief end of every writer to make 
easy reading. A proper handhng of his 
subject may not admit of that. But he 
should make as easy reading as the proper 
handling of his subject will allow. He 
ought to marshal his ideas, or his facts, 
in their proper order, and to use the 
right words, and to put them in the right 
places, so that the reader will have no 
unnecessary trouble in taking what he 
gives out, but may find a profit in what 
he says and a pleasure in the way he 
says it. 

Why does any one take to writing as 
a calling .? There are reasons enough. 
It is one way to get an honest living, and 
a man may lawfully choose it, and may 
live by it, better or worse, and be happy 
in the practice of it. Writing is both a 
profession and an art. On its money- 
getting side it seems to me not a particu- 
larly good profession. A successful law- 

[62] 



WRITING 

yer or a successful doctor commonly 
earns more money than a successful 
writer, and there are vastly more lawyers 
and doctors who succeed in a measure 
worth talking about than writers. But 
a man seldom takes to the profession of 
writing with money-making as his pri- 
mary object, any more than he takes to 
the ministry or to teaching for that pur- 
pose. He takes to writing because he likes 
it and has a turn for it, or because he 
cannot wait to fit himself for some other 
profession, or is debarred for some reason 
from other professions, or because oppor- 
tunity offers. Once he commences writ- 
ing and undertakes to live by his work, 
he will probably want to get out of it 
all the money he can without sacrifice of 
things that are worth more to him than 
mere money. Mere money, for example, 
will not tempt a wise man, let alone a 
good one, to take service with a news- 
paper which he does not approve, nor 

[63] 



WRITING 

to write trash, which, being capable of 
better things, he knows to be trash, be- 
cause the market for trash happens to 
be better than the market for literature. 
There is no great harm in writing trash, 
so be it it is not vicious, if a man can 
do no better. But for a man of real 
talent and literary power to turn away 
from art, and the truth that art must 
express, to trash and drivel is prostitu- 
tion. It is a writer's duty to write his 
best, and he cannot turn his back on that 
duty for long without paying the penalty 
in reputation and in power. As for what 
he may earn, Stevenson says grandly 
about that, that ** surely at this time of 
day in the nineteenth century there is 
nothing that an honest man should fear 
more timorously than getting and spend- 
ing more than he deserves." That is a 
noble sentiment, and Stevenson, to do 
him justice, lived handsomely up to it, 
writing his best always, sticking to art, 

[64] 



WRITING 

which is difficult, shunning slop, which 
is easy, taking what came to him, which 
eventually was a good deal, and earning 
more than he got. But Stevenson was 
always of a Bohemian turn. He did not 
raise a family, nor have boys and girls 
in school, and when he wrote down that 
fine sentiment I think he had not yet even 
acquired a wife. Most honest writers 
nowadays would rather that they them- 
selves got and spent more than they 
deserved than that the excess was added 
to the moral burden of their publishers. 
To write down below your natural or 
possible level because it pays better is 
bad, and is even a bad business policy; 
but so long as you write the best you can 
it is no sin to take all you can gracefully 
get for what you have written. 

But not many writers get rich. Some 
newspaper owners do, but that is busi- 
ness. Some successful novelists make a 
good deal of money. One or two books 

[65] 



WRITING 

every year are worth a little fortune to 
their writers. The possibility thus illus- 
trated of making a good pot of money 
rather suddenly in the writing business 
helps to make it attractive. There are 
good chances in it, good money prizes, 
and they are useful in any line of industry. 
Stevenson says: "There are two duties 
incumbent upon any man who enters on 
the business of writing: truth to the fact 
and a good spirit in the treatment. In 
every department of literature, though so 
low as hardly to deserve the name, truth 
to the fact is of importance to the educa- 
tion and comfort of mankind, and so hard 
to preserve that the faithful trying to do 
so will lend some dignity to the man who 
tries it." That seems to be very much 
to the point. Truth to the fact and a 
good spirit in the treatment is what we 
should aim at in the general conduct of 
life; but in writing, certainly, an en- 
deavour after nothing less will serve. To 

[661 



WRITING 

disclose the truth — so much of it as is 
needed — seems to be the chief end of the 
profession of writing. No one can know 
all the truth. No one can even know 
as much of it as he needs to know. But 
any writer can avoid writing what he 
knows not to be true, and any reasonably 
careful writer can usually avoid com- 
mitting himself to statements that he is 
not sure of. One defect in newspapers 
is that they print so much that is not so. 
They are full of half-truths, but for that 
matter so is the world generally. Get- 
ting at the whole truth about anything 
is apt to be a work of vast difficulty and 
slow accomplishment, and newspapers are 
always in a hurry; but newspapers in 
general take a great deal more pains to 
learn and tell the truth than they get 
credit for. 

The majority of writers seem to have 
come to that calling somewhat as men 
come to State-prison — without any orig- 

[67] 



WRITING 

inal purpose to get there, but after failure 
to realize different and perhaps better 
intentions. It is a rare thing for a boy 
to be deliberately educated to be a writer. 
It has been so precarious a calling that 
the usage has been to train youths for 
some calling in which the average chance 
of success was better. Then if they turn 
writers and don't succeed they will have 
something to fall back on. Sons of 
editors may tend naturally to the work on 
the family paper, but even then the at- 
tempt is often made to educate them as 
lawyers or put them into business. Ex- 
amples may be cited at random: Lowell 
studied law, Emerson was a preacher, 
Holmes was a doctor and only practised 
literature as an avocation. Keats, who 
was born to write, went from school to 
be an apothecary's apprentice. Henry 
James studied law. Mr. Howells, to be 
sure, was educated in newspaper oflBices 
in Ohio, but Cable was clerk to a cotton 

[681 



WRITING 

factor before he became a reporter, and 
Thoraas Nelson Page practised law a 
good while and successfully before he 
became known as a writer. The rule 
still seems to be that before any man 
takes to writing for his bread he must have 
made a serious effort to get his bread by 
some other means. A man rarely gets a 
license to be a writer until he has de- 
monstrated his unfitness or indisposition 
to be something else. 

With women the way is less beset with 
obstacles. Writing is well adapted to be 
a domestic industry which folks can take 
up at home and work at in their spare 
time. It rivals singing and acting as the 
industry in which women compete most 
successfully with men. Lots of women 
work on newspapers and magazines. 
Shoals of them write books, and they 
write their full proportion of successful 
books. They are particularly good at 
stories, long and short. Mrs. Ward comes 

[69] 



WRITING 

pretty near being the leader of the con- 
temporary novelists. Mrs. Wharton is 
extremely respected as a fabricator of 
tales, and nobody beats Mrs. Mary Wil- 
kins Freeman at her kind of short stories. 
Even modest people like to make stir 
enough in the world while they are in 
it to be identified. The conditions for 
making that much of a stir are very 
favourable in the literary calling. The 
thing that most brings reputation is adver- 
tisement. A writer who puts his name 
to his work is constantly advertised. If 
he can break into print at all, his name 
gets to be known, and if anybody likes 
his deliverances they come to feel that 
they have made acquaintance with the 
writer of them. So the great writers are 
known by millions of people, and the 
lesser ones in their day by thousands. 
While a highly successful and useful man 
of business, or lawyer, or doctor, may be 
known only to a restricted circle of ac- 

[70] 



WRITING 

quaintance and a limited number beyond 
it, a writer of perhaps less ability and 
less merit may be known, in a way, up 
and down the land. No profession is so 
well advertised except, perhaps, those of 
the actor, the politician, and the high- 
class criminal, and the last is at a disad- 
vantage, because when he becomes emi- 
nently famous they hang him or put him 
in jail. 

Of course, a literary reputation, be- 
sides being gently gratifying to one's 
vanity, has a business value, because the 
writings of a man who is well known and 
has gained the ear of readers is worth 
a great deal more than the work of a 
man whom the public doesn't yet know. 
And besides the pecuniary value of a 
literary reputation, it is pleasant. To 
be looked up to a little, or even affection- 
ately regarded, is one of the most com- 
pensating things in life, and many writers 
have been and are so regarded by a great 

[71] 



WRITING 

number of readers whom they have never 
seen, but whom they have helped, or to 
whom they have given pleasure. 

And besides all that, writing is inter- 
esting work. A man's work is the thing 
that is going to take most of his time 
and energy, that he is going to put his 
best into, and that is going to be his 
chief reliance for entertainment. Work 
in the long run is a vastly more durable 
form of entertainment than play, though 
play has its uses and is good for a change. 
Any work a man devotes himself to is 
apt to interest him, but some kinds of 
work are pleasanter and more intrinsi- 
cally interesting than other kinds. Writ- 
ing is exceedingly pleasant if you can 
make it go well enough. It is the prac- 
tice of an art, and to practise an art 
with skill is delightful. It is a pleas- 
ure to be able to kick a football so that 
it will go between the goal-posts, or where 
you want it to. That is a mighty skilful 

[721 



WRITING 

job, and it gives pleasure in the doing 
because it is pretty and because it is 
difficult. To catch an idea, and send it 
where you want it to go, and have it 
go as it should and land where it is needed, 
is also an exploit that makes you happy. 
To do a good piece of work satisfies a 
certain hunger of the mind. Not that a 
writer always knows when a piece of his 
work is particularly good or not. Very 
often he doesn't. Once he gets started 
on his subject, all he can do is to keep 
his mind at work on it and put down, the 
best he knows how, the best his mind will 
yield. What he gets depends upon what 
is in him and whether he manages to get 
it out. 

Writing verses is an entertaining branch 
of the literary calling, provided you can 
do it to your taste. Somehow, our facul- 
ties being such as they are, there are 
wonderful possibilities in poetry for stir- 
ring them. Verse- writing is good prac- 

[731 



WRITING 

tice in getting the run of words and deter- 
mining their order. You not only have 
to have a good many words at your com- 
mand in order to choose such as make 
rhyme and rhythm come right, but you 
are apt to have to put them together in 
ever so many different combinations be- 
fore you get the one you want. And there 
are such astounding possibilities in those 
combinations. The words are the same, 
or as good, as have served the English- 
writing poets since Chaucer. Is there not 
always the possibility that you may string 
a few dozen or a few hundred of them to- 
gether in such a fashion that mankind 
will neither suffer them nor you to be for- 
gotten.^ It has been done. Why may 
it not be done again ? It can. There 
are all the pieces if one can only invent a 
surpassing pattern. It always seems poS' 
sihle to put the familiar little words to- 
gether so as to make a surpassing poem, 
but very, very few writers have done it, 

[74] 



WRITING 

and those few have not done it by acci- 
dent, but commonly as the fruit, more or 
less immediate, of long-continued effort 
coupled with genius. 

Of making many books and myriads 
of magazines and newspapers there is no 
end, and armies of writers and would-be 
writers are always at it. And yet the 
supply of good writers is, nowadays, never 
equal to the demand. That is a great 
advantage. It keeps up rates, and make 
it unnecessary for writers to form unions 
and have strikes. There is a natural 
monopoly of high talent. Money can 
stimulate the production of good writing 
somewhat by offering inducement to good 
minds to take literary exercise, but it 
cannot buy good writing unless it is 
written, and it very often pays for quali- 
ties that are not delivered. Inducement 
and inspiration are not identical. Money 
may offer inducement, but inspiration 
comes from other sources. The love of 

[75] 



WRITING 

approbation is one source of inspiration, 
and in particular the hunger for the 
special approbation of careless young 
women of no particular discrimination 
about literature has been the inspiration 
of more good verses than all the gold 
pieces any one ever saw. And the love 
of truth, and the love of beauty, and the 
love of nature and of mankind are all 
inspirations of endless effectiveness. 



[76] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

It seems to me that one keeps near 
enough to accuracy for practical pur- 
poses in saying that the two things that 
contribute most to make life an interest- 
ing experience are diversity of sex and 
disparity of means. Discrepancy of state- 
ment also makes for sport, but that is 
only a detail. The great thing that 
makes people worth cultivating is that 
there are so many different kinds of 
them. First, there is the sweeping differ- 
ence based on gender, all the men being, 
happily, different from all the women. 
Then no two men are alike, and no two 
women are alike, and the conditions of 
life for every individual differ from the 
conditions of every other individual. It 
is a glorious and wonderful scheme of 
variety. 

• [77] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

To be sure, disparity of means is a 
derivative rather than a primary diiBFer- 
ence. People's fortunes and incomes are 
unequal because their minds, their luck, 
their chances, or their abilities are un- 
equal. Ampler means may even be a con- 
sequence of tougher consciences. But 
however it comes, disparity of means (pro- 
vided it isn't carried to too absurd an 
excess) is a great blessing to mankind in 
that it adds so much variety to life. 
There are a lot of different things to be 
done in the world that are remunerative. 
Some of them are within reach of the 
rich alone ; others only the poor can ajff ord 
to enjoy. If each of us had the same 
daily allowance of money, a great many 
good exercises would be neglected, and we 
would come much nearer to wanting, all 
of us, to do about the same thing than we 
do at present. Nobody would have a 
great house, nobody would have a big 
yacht, there would be no big diamonds 
[78] • 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

cut any more, no group of our fellow- 
creatures would undertake the duty of 
affording a spectacle of luxury and em- 
bellishment to the rest. The dining- 
rooms of the liveliest hotels and restau- 
rants in New York would cease to be a 
show of clothes and beauty. There would 
be no big private automobiles — nothing 
but rubberneck-wagons. No one would 
raise good horses, and if any one did, 
nobody would know it. 

And if there were no disparity of means 
we could not talk about other people's 
money and what they do with it, nor be 
sorry for them because they were so hard 
put to it for sport, nor conclude that, on 
the whole, it was wholesomer to have less 
(but not too little) and work for it; nor 
could we enjoy the excitement of setting 
snares to get detachable masses of their 
money away from them by lawful means 
for our own use. And the other people, 
who have the money, would be balked of 

[79] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

the pleasure of private reiteration that, 
say what you like, money has its value 
and is not going out of fashion for a 
while yet. When you think of the amount 
of talk and thought, aspiration, resigna- 
tion, effort, and philosophy that has its 
roots in disparity of means, you must 
realize how ill that incident could be 
spared out of human existence. 

The disparity can be too great, of 
course. We can get due disparity of 
means at vastly less expense than it is 
costing us at present, when fortunes run 
to hundreds of millions. But better pres- 
ent cost than no disparity. 

And with disparity of means and the 
other disparities, most of which (except 
sex) impinge on it somewhere, comes the 
great daily question of associates. The 
world, luckily, is full of people of different 
genders and manners and unequal fort- 
unes and abilities, all of whom are ours 
to know and play with if we can. But we 

[801 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

cannot play with them all; there are too 
many. We must choose and be chosen. 
Some measure of selection becomes in- 
evitable in every society as soon as its 
numbers increase enough to afford scope 
for choice, and of course selection im- 
plies some degree of exclusion. To culti- 
vate one person or one family more, neces- 
sitates cultivating some other persons or 
families less. That is inevitable. Tastes 
differ, and a preference for one person 
or one lot of people does not necessarily 
imply disparagement of others. Propin- 
quity, associations, relationship, and vari- 
ous circumstances determine who our 
friends shall be, and the advantage of 
having desirable and profitable friends is 
so obvious that the most careless observer 
cannot fail to discern it. 

Indeed, suitable acquaintances are so 
good to have that appreciation of the 
advantage of having them leads some of us 
into the serious mistake of being over 

[81] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

particular as to whom we shall know. 
The desire for the company of the best 
people we can get at — our betters if pos- 
sible — is an aspiration that in itself is 
creditable to our intelligence, but we fall 
into a serious mistake when we let it go 
so far as to prompt us to limit our ac- 
quaintances to just the right people and 
no others. An exclusiveness that shuts 
us off from even an experimental knowl- 
edge of varieties of our fellow-creatures 
is neither conducive to our profit nor to 
our popularity. We laugh at people who, 
being highly pleased with the social posi- 
tion they have gained or highly solicitous 
to gain a better one, live in a state of 
daily apprehension for fear they will 
know somebody they ought not to know. 
They practise exclusiveness to their detri- 
ment. It is not a good thing in itself. 
As an inevitable incident of selection it 
has to be tolerated, but when it is so 
practised as to limit the field in which 

[821 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

selection can operate, it is palpably 
ridiculous. To know many people and 
many kinds of people is in itself a very 
advantageous thing; for the more people 
we know, the better chance we have to 
learn whom we like and whom we can 
help and who can help us. 

One of the best things about work- 
ing for a living is that it gives the worker 
common interests with people with whom 
he could not otherwise come in contact. 
There are so many kinds of relations in 
life that are pleasantly profitable: the 
relations of social equals and of social 
unequals, of coevals and of persons of 
different ages, of master and servant, 
housekeeper and marketman, employer 
and employee, and endless others. One 
of the most accessible of all is the rela- 
tion of coworkers, of persons of various 
stations, duties, and capacities engaged 
in the same task or in tasks which touch 
one another. The thing that more than 

[83] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

any other single thing makes the indi- 
viduals who compose human society 
interdependent is the necessity of making 
a living or the desire to make money. 
One does not realize either of these as- 
pirations to advantage without getting 
down off any perch on which he may 
find himself installed, and working in 
the crowd shoulder to shoulder with the 
other workers. A high degree of ex- 
clusiveness is only possible to do-noth- 
ings, and is only prized by know-noth- 
ings. The people who value it seem to 
think that the crowd contaminates and 
vulgarizes; that such virtue as they may 
contain is diluted and weakened by a 
large acquaintance with ordinary people; 
that the only people to have easy rela- 
tions with are the "nice" people, the 
people of social position who have some- 
thing advantageous to confer, the people 
who are best to dine with and out of 
whom something can be made. That is 

[84] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

a mistaken notion, and the mistake is one 
of small minds. The people — the great 
mass of the people — are the fountain of 
honour and the main source of most 
advantages. The wise course is to get 
in touch with as many of them as is rea- 
sonably convenient. There are a thou- 
sand relations in life besides dinner- 
giving relations that are worth while; 
there are a thousand phases of friendship 
that are worth cultivating besides the 
kind that flourishes between persons of 
equal social condition. Social condition 
is largely an accident. It does not touch 
character nor limit sympathy. In every 
walk of life there are the traits that 
invite and repay friendship. There is a 
common ground, if one's feet can only 
find it, on which all true people can stand 
in a substantial equality, an equality 
of the spirit and the affections. In every 
walk of life and irrespective of advan- 
tages of means and education there are 

[85] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

people whose minds are interesting ; people 
of talent, of humour, of sagacity, of sound 
discretion and integrity; people of con- 
stancy, capable of self-sacrifice and high 
devotion. The acquaintance of such 
people is worth cultivating wherever 
one finds them. Life is an aggregation 
of daily experiences, most of which are 
trivial, but the aggregate of trivial things 
counts for a vast deal. The familiar 
faces we see in the daily round and the 
brief exchanges of salutation and dis- 
course that one encounters are incidents 
of superficial importance, but they go a 
long way toward making the difference 
between existence that is profitable and 
existence that is dull. To make the 
world a friendly place one must show it 
a friendly face. 

There is as much inequality of posi- 
tion, social and fiscal, in this country 
as in most others, but there is less definite 
classification than in Europe. A vast 

[86] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

number of American families, especially 
those that are descendants of settlers 
who came before the Revolution, stand 
on pretty much the same level so far as 
heredity goes. From generation to gen- 
eration some members of some families 
have forged ahead out of the ruck, got 
a better place, more education, and more 
polished manners than the average, and 
passed their advantages down to their 
descendants, who have sometimes re- 
tained and sometimes lost them. The 
difference of position between a seasoned 
American millionaire and a mill-hand or 
a small farmer is undeniably substantial, 
yet they may both be of the same general 
stock, and both be made, individually, of 
pretty much the same stuff. It may 
seem strained to say that they do not 
belong to different classes, but it is true 
in the sense that there are no definite 
class barriers between them. The mil- 
lionaire does not belong to a ruling class 

[87] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

and the mill-hand to a lower one. In 
their derivation and in their feelings and 
attitudes toward things and people they 
are not unlikely to have a great deal in 
common, and if the mill-hand happens 
to be clever and lucky in his opportu- 
nities, what distance there is between 
him and the millionaire may be so far 
bridged in a couple of decades that their 
children or grandchildren will start in 
life with chances very nearly equal. In 
spite of the trusts and all other imputed 
obstacles there is still a nearer approach 
to equality of opportunity in this coun- 
try than in most others. As yet, at least, 
we are not classified. No American is a 
prince, none is a peasant. The great 
mass of our people is like the surface of 
the ocean at any given moment — full of 
surging inequalities, but undivided. I 
am not sure that this unclassified state 
that we value so much and with so much 
reason is the most favourable one for 

[88] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

social interdependence. The impression 
one gets from reading some English novels 
is that more helpful, intimate, and affec- 
tionate relations may be obtained in a 
classified country between individuals of 
different classes than are apt to prevail 
in our less definitely organized society 
between the folks on the crests of the 
waves and those in the trough. Where 
there are classes, there are strong ties 
between classes — class habits, class duties, 
class attitudes toward life; a little less, 
perhaps, of the general scramble in which 
every man is for himself. That feature 
of the British landscape which Mr. Henry 
James missed most in rural New Hamp- 
shire was the country parson, whose great 
affair in English life, as I understand it, 
is to keep class in friendly and helpful 
touch with class. Here also religion and 
church associations are a most important 
tie between different kinds of people, but 
the English clergy, I should say, are in a 

[89] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

somewhat better position to promote so- 
cial solidarity than most of our clergy. 

And of course politics is a tie of the 
first importance. A politician who 
amounts to anything can tolerate no 
nonsense about social exclusiveness. To 
know men — all sorts of men — is the 
breath of political life. To keep in touch 
with the voters, to know what is in the 
minds of men, to know what they want, 
what they know and feel, and how they 
can be influenced, is the pith of the poli- 
tician's job. I wish we all were active 
politicians. Perhaps if we were all 
active Christians with a lively concern for 
our neighbour's welfare it would do as 
well or better, but the politicians illustrate 
particularly well the advantage of com- 
prehensive human relations. The closet 
politician, who withholds himself from 
the mass of his fellows, may have his 
uses, but to gain elective offices (except 
by purchase) is not one of them. To be 

[90] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

sure, being all things to all men takes 
time, and the social comprehensiveness of 
a practical politician commonly leaves 
him little leisure for anything else. The 
degree of incidental exclusiveness that 
guards a man's time and husbands his 
energies for his daily work is indispen- 
sable to the accomplishment of any seri- 
ous business, but that is a diflFerent matter 
from exclusiveness that shuts out for the 
mere sake of excluding. 

Excepting hopeless bores who use up 
time and neither give nor get anything, 
very few acquaintances are detrimental 
to responsible grown-up people. Parents 
are apt to fidget about their children's 
friends and to want them to know the 
right kind of children and no others. 
To shield children as far as possible 
from bad company is no more than com- 
mon-sense. To steer them into associa- 
tions that promise to be to their advan- 
tage is what every competent parent wants 

[911 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

to do. But even children profit by vari- 
ety in their associates. To teach them 
to be socially exclusive is to teach them 
to be snobs, and against that most right- 
minded children instinctively rebel. 

The people who hit off their social 
relations to the best advantage are those 
in whom a strong sense of human broth- 
erhood is tempered by taste and discre- 
tion. Spontaneous friendliness is a most 
precious attribute. To have a friendly 
feeling for whatever is human is a great 
birthright, and one, by the way, that is 
much more likely to come down from 
parents who have enjoyed themselves in 
helping their fellow-men than from such 
as have set themselves to skin them. 
The noli me tangere attitude is the natu- 
ral one for whoever has got more out of 
the world than the world owes him or 
who hopes to get more than is due. It 
is very much easier to regulate a natural 
friendliness by discretion than to expand 

[92] 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

an unreasonable offishness by assumed 
cordiality. A very moderate discretion 
suffices to keep a friendly nature within 
requisite bounds. One's time needs some 
protection if one's duties are to be done, 
and whatever one's personal choice of 
company may be, he should be wary of 
imposing it on others who have a con- 
trary taste. 

And even in cases where people limit 
their social relations overstraitly, there 
is a choice between the exclusiveness that 
is based on one's own taste even if it is 
faulty, and that which is due to an un- 
easy regard for the social taste of some 
one not immediately concerned. To as- 
semble a lot of uncongenial people at a 
dinner is a bad mistake. To be scared 
out of asking whom you will to dinner 
because some one else is not used to ask 
them is a worse mistake still. There 
comes in the difference between mere 
exclusiveness and snobbishness. The 

[931 



EXCLUSIVENESS 

merely exclusive people bite their noses 
off to suit themselves; the snobs do it 
to placate some one else. When we 
spoil our fun, by all means let us do it 
for our own pleasure. 

A great deal of respect is due to people 
who have a good time. If they manage 
to enjoy life in any reputable and pru- 
dent fashion, their scheme of living can- 
not be wholly amiss. The kind of en- 
joyment that involves too prodigal an 
expenditure of the vital forces is not dur- 
able and does not commend itself to wise 
observers. But people who obviously 
manage to have a good time without 
noticeable detriment to health, estate, or 
character, even if they may not be per- 
sons of an especially exalted tpye of char- 
acter, are apt at least to be genuine peo- 
ple, who know what they want and whom 
they like, and are never bothered by 
anybody's exclusiveness except their own. 



[94 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING 
ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

On nothing a year, we know it is pos- 
sible to live, provided the circumstances 
are favourable and the wit to do it ade- 
quate. Becky and Rawdon managed it, 
and a famous chapter in fiction tells how. 
In the newspapers, from time to time, we 
read marvellous stories of its being done, 
and hear other stories that the papers 
don't get. As a rule the stories don't 
end well, either those we read or those we 
hear; but that is only a detail. The 
thing can be done, sometimes for long 
periods of time, and the living, while it 
lasts, may be very luxurious and expen- 
sive. Very commonly, indeed, it is pyro- 
technic; a rocket flight, admired of be- 
holders: sissssss — a long reach skyward; 
boom ! ! ! — a glory of stars; ahhhh ! ! ! 

[95] 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING 

— and somewhere a stick falls in the 
night, and perhaps a reporter picks it 
up. 

It can be done, but it is not quite nor- 
mal, and therefore not a very important 
subject for thought. The great mass of 
folks, if they live, must have something to 
live on; and their success, complete or 
partial, in living on what they have, or 
their failure to do it, is among the vitally 
important concerns of life: immensely 
important, economically, morally, spiritu- 
ally, every way. The times have been 
good and now are bad. What ails them ? 
Mainly this: the impossibility, demon- 
strated by the practical experience of 
enormous numbers of us Americans, let 
alone residents of foreign parts, of living 
on anything a year. We have all, practi- 
cally all, had something a year to live on. 
Many of us have had more than we ever 
had before in all our lives. But whether 
we have had more or less, a much too 

[96] 



ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

large proportion of us have found it im- 
possible to live on it. Consequently, in- 
stead of accumulating capital we have 
accumulated debts; and have gone on 
accumulating them until the other da^y — 
ahhh ! ! ! — there was a far-off sound in the 
blue empyrean, and something dropped. 

Moralists tell us that we human creat- 
ures never stand still ; that we are always 
moving either up or down, getting better 
or getting worse ; gaining ground heaven- 
ward, or progressing the other way. 
Cities do not stand still. Either they 
gain in wealth and population, or they 
fall behind. A business, we are used to 
hear it said, must be either growing or 
diminishing. There is no keeping at the 
same point in business. So it is, I dare 
say, with people and their incomes: they 
are either spending appreciably more than 
they have, or saving money. Which of 
the two it is depends a little on how much 
the income is, but a great deal more 

[97] 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING 

upon the attitude of the mind. Thrift, 
that brilliant virtue, is the condition, be- 
come chronic, of liking money enough 
better than other objects to retain the 
money, and get along without the other 
objects, or defer their acquisition. The 
consequences of this condition are such 
details as getting along without super- 
fluities, and making what we have go as 
far as we can. People whose minds are 
hard set on thrift, save at almost all times, 
and under almost all circumstances, and 
find their pleasure in it ; and though their 
expenditures increase, very properly, with 
their incomes, their margin of savings in- 
creases still more, until, so progressing 
under the control of reason, they arrive at 
last at the ecstatic condition of having 
everything they want and getting richer 
every day. 

Of course there are hazards about this 
way of doing. Over-enthusiasm in it 
may lead to such a pinching off of wants 

[98] 



ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

in the bud that not enough may develop 
to make life interesting; for to come to a 
solvent maturity without wants must be 
almost as annoying as to arrive at old age 
without any children. This is liable to 
happen to people of ability, who, starting 
very poor and economizing perforce in 
early education, grub along hard and 
thriftily and ably until with good luck 
they find themselves with plenty of money 
but an aching dearth of profitable wants, 
and too old and set in habits to develop 
some. Examples of this miscalculation 
are not rare, but they are not as comfort- 
ing to philosophical observers as they 
ought to be, because the victims, being 
disciplined persons and trained in a hard 
school, usually plod along with uncon- 
scious stoicism, either ignorant that any- 
thing ails them, or consoled by indulgence 
on a larger scale than ever of the habit 
of acquisition which it has been their 
life's work to perfect. 

[99] 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF Llf^ING 

Thrift may overreach itself, but it usu- 
ally happens the other way. It is the 
development of wants that is overdone. 
To the m^ajority of us, as day after diay 
we look first at our money and then at the 
importunate desires that the money could 
help to allay, the satisfaction of the de- 
sires looks better than the money. It is 
not at all that we are afraid we shall not 
develop wants enough to make our old 
age happy, for when we worry about our 
declining years it is for fear we shall be 
in the poorhouse, wanting everything. If, 
having ordinary prudence, we let go of 
money that we ought to keep — of all our 
income and something more — it is apt 
to be either because we expect to have a 
larger income presently, or a more con- 
venient chance to save. That neither of 
these expectations is well founded makes 
little difference. Our expenditure de- 
pends partly on what we have, but largely 
on how we feel, and that is why in pros- 

[100] 



ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

perous times extravagance soon outruns 
even prosperity. In such times people 
actually have more to spend and spend 
it; but besides that they have inflated 
expectations, and they spend them too. 
Get a large proportion of the people of 
the country to doing that, spending what 
they have — much more than usual — and 
part of what they expect to get besides, 
and of course the demand for what they 
want quickly begins to strain the supply. 
Prices go up, everybody has to pay more 
for everything; and folks on fixed in- 
comes who used to save money can only 
keep up the habit by increasing self-denial. 
One would think that money would be 
saved in prosperous times when there is 
plenty of it about. But no, that is not the 
time when it is saved. It is then that it 
is spent. Everybody spends it — ^govern- 
ments, railroads, corporations, capitalists, 
housekeepers, house builders, collectors. 
People expand their wants in such times, 

r 101 1 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING 

and satisfy some of them, and then is 
when it is most of all impossible to live 
on anything a year. But after all the 
money has been spent a few times over 
and has begun to be scarce, and borrow- 
ing has come to be a serious matter, and 
folks have much less to spend and no 
expectations, then everybody groans and 
begins to save, not only trying desperately 
to squeeze back inside of the bounds of 
income, but to pay back what was spent 
in expectation of a time when saving 
would have become convenient. 

To most of us that time never comes. 
And yet there are things for which we 
spend more than we can afford, that really 
do justify our expenditures, so that after 
the money has been spent and we are 
pinched for the lack of it, we would still 
rather have what it bought than have the 
money back. 

It does not appear that Ebenezer Web- 
ster and his courageous wife ever re- 

[1021 



ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

gretted the excesses of expenditure which 
they incurred in buying education for 
their sons Ezekiel and Daniel. If they 
had been willing to get what they could 
out of the two boys, and limit them to 
such advantages as they could reasonably 
afford, they might have had a vastly 
easier approach to old age. But Daniel 
seemed likely in his mental parts, and 
Ebenezer — coming into the profitable 
employment of side justice of the Com- 
mon Pleas, with a three- or four-hundred- 
dollar increase of income just as Daniel 
reached school age — succumbed miser- 
ably to temptation and sent Daniel off to 
Exeter to school, and later to Dartmouth 
College. And Daniel, no thriftier than 
his father, no sooner got a fair bite of 
education himself than he insisted that his 
dear elder brother, Ezekiel, should also 
partake of the expensive dainty. The 
whole family went on into further ex- 
travagance and resulting debt and hard- 

[103] 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING 

ship to qualify the other boy to rise in Ufe. 
It made very hard work for Ebenezer 
and his wife. Neither they nor the boys 
themselves ever got over it. Ebenezer 
died at sixty-seven a worked-out man, be- 
queathing to his son Daniel, then a coun- 
try lawyer, who supported him in his 
closing years, a legacy of debts. But he 
had had the gratification of seeing Daniel's 
progress through school and college and 
to the bar, and had heard him make his 
first speech in court. He seems never to 
have wanted back the money he had ex- 
pended on him. The mother lived ten 
years longer. When she died in Eze- 
kiel's house, Daniel had come to be a 
member of Congress. Neither did she 
want the money back. By the time 
Daniel inherited his father's debts he 
already had debts of his own, for having 
nothing to start with, he was a borrower 
from the beginning. He finally paid the 
father's debts, but getting used to debt 

[104] 



ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

early in life, he formed a habit of it, which 
he kept up to the end of his days, and 
which was a great sorrow and expense to 
his friends, though not entirely without 
consolations to himself. But not even 
this distressing habit or the embarrassing 
propensity to have what he wanted at all 
times whether he could pay for it or not, 
availed, so far as appears, to make him 
regret that expensive taste for education 
in his father which was the root of the 
whole difficulty. 

So sometimes it does seem to pay to 
plunge into expenditures that one's in- 
come does not really warrant. The 
chance to educate young Daniel was a 
now-or-never opportunity. Education 
can be deferred, but not very long, and 
the need of catching it while it is still 
attainable is one of the commonest rea- 
sons why anything a year is impossible to 
live on. The other reasons are apt to be 
akin to this one. If we are decently 

[105] 



THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LIVING 

provident we are slow to commit excesses 
of expenditure for things we can postpone, 
but much readier to commit them to se- 
cure what looks like a great investment, 
or a great bargain, on which we have only 
a fleeting option. We want the things 
which we shall lose forever if we don't 
strain a point and get them now; the 
house that will be indispensable in a year 
or two, and is so much cheaper now, and 
then all the things that go with it and 
that belong to living in it. The having 
things to match and making the details of 
living conform to the general scale and 
scope that we affect are astonishing allure- 
ments to the expenditures that exceed 
income. 

Most insidious of all is the perfectly 
natural propensity to want and to culti- 
vate associates and friends that suit us, to 
keep in touch with old friends whom we 
like, and to gather unto ourselves such 
new ones as day-to-day life may offer. 

[106] 



ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

That comes to having a place in the world 
and keeping it, and when one has, or 
thinks he has, a place worth keeping, and 
one that his children may like when he 
has finished with it, he does not immedi- 
ately let go his hold on it because beef 
goes up five cents a pound, or eggs ten 
cents a dozen. It is worth a good deal 
to be a social being with habitual rela- 
tions with one's fellow beings, and com- 
mand of machinery to facilitate them ; life 
is pleasanter so; but it tends to restrict 
liberty and promptness of action, and to 
retard changes and economies that may 
in themselves be clearly advisable. 

If we have perched too high, and must 
come down, it is much less rasping to 
have company in the descent. When a 
flock of birds leave a tree and descend 
upon a field, it is a pretty sight and cheer- 
ful; but when one poor bird is knocked 
off a limb by a missile, it hurts, and is 
depressing. It was said in perfect sober- 

[107] 



LIVING ON ANYTHING A YEAR 

ness six months ago that there was acute 
discomfort among folks who had been re- 
duced from affluence to fifty thousand a 
year. But it helped them, no doubt, to 
feel that they had so many companions in 
economy. When everybody is shaken 
down by the same jolt, all keep their rela- 
tive positions, and that is a profound 
solace. 

Ah, well, when incomes all around 
cease to be adjustable to the scale of liv- 
ing, the scale of living has to be adjusted 
to incomes. Diamond dealers in New 
York are in trouble because nobody is buy- 
ing diamonds, and Washington says that 
champagne is about to be marked down 
twenty per cent. Vainly the snare is set 
in the sight of the bird. We have all re- 
pented, and what we want now is not 
cheaper diamonds or cheaper champagne, 
but cheaper milk and eggs and meat and 
cheaper Bibles. 

[108] 



RICHES 

Christmas this year comes at the end 
of a twelvemonth in which public atten- 
tion has been drawn with unusual per- 
sistence to the ardour of sundry of our 
fellow countrymen in the pursuit of gain. 
Legislators, courts, and investigating 
committees have taken cognizance of 
it. Moralists are everywhere moralizing 
about it. It is not the struggles of needy 
persons to make a living that excite re- 
mark, but the urgent efforts of people not 
perceptibly threatened with want to gather 
to themselves very considerable annual 
aggregations of dross. In many con- 
spicuous instances investigations have 
seemed to disclose in men of most re- 
spectable standing such a lack of scruple 
and delicacy in money-getting as seems to 
betoken an overestimation of the value 

[109] 



RICHES 

of riches as compared with other precious 
things. Impressed by these signs of the 
times, the clergy rehearse '*the Apos- 
tle's affectionate and solemn warning 
against the haste to be rich." A college 
president finds Americans confronted by 
a situation due to lack of moral principle, 
and avers that greed for gain and greed 
for power have blinded men to the old- 
time distinctions between right and wrong. 
A banker of national reputation declares 
to fellow bankers in convention that dis- 
honesty in high places gravely threatens 
the future of the country, and that the 
restoration of the old, rigid standards of 
honesty and uprightness is indispensable 
to our defence against socialism. And 
the root of all this evil is the desire for 
riches! It is a curious yearning, whole- 
some, like hunger, up to a certain point, 
but more prone than hunger to run to a 
dangerous excess. Undoubtedly if as a 
people we better understood riches, their 

[110] 



RICHES 

relative value, and the limitations of their 
usefulness, we should be a better people 
than we are, and honester. Incidentally, 
we should be better equipped to keep 
Christmas in a fit spirit, for since men 
and money are the chief valuables on 
earth, a diminished solicitude about 
money would leave a larger share of our 
strength and time to be occupied by 
solicitude about men. 

It is foolish to undervalue money, and 
just as foolish to overvalue it. All of us 
— practically all — know that one can 
have too little, most of us believe that it 
is possible to have just about enough, 
and some of us are growing firm in the 
suspicion that it is possible to have so 
much that it is a nuisance, and the re- 
sponsibility for it and its increase a dis- 
abling burden. Fortunes that are so 
enormous as to make their owners a 
legitimate object of the commiseration of 
thoughtful people are rather a new thing 
[111] 



RICHES 

in this country, but they have really 
come. Enough really is as good as too 
much. It sounds emotional and argu- 
mentative to say so, but it is so. 

The condition of having too little money 
is too familiar to need exposition. The 
great majority of people have too little 
money, and would be better off and hap- 
pier if they had more and spent it. The 
condition of having about enough offers 
better points for discussion. There is no 
arbitrary sum or income that is enough. 
What is enough for one person is not 
enough for another, and what means ease 
and afl3uence in one condition of life 
would mean poverty in another. What is 
enough depends upon the individual, his 
education, his aspirations, his environ- 
ment, the size of his family, and the pos- 
sibilities that are in him. Anthony Hope 
in a recent story makes one of his char- 
acters observe that there is more differ- 
ence between three thousand pounds a 

[1121 



RICHES 

year and nothing than there is between 
three thousand pounds a year and all the 
rest of the money in the world. A family 
can live a certain kind of lazy, pleasant 
country life in England on about three 
thousand pounds a year, and a fairly 
prudent man who wants to live that sort 
of life is about as well off on a sure in- 
come of that size as he would be if he 
had a great deal more. 

Of course, standards of living vary 
enormously; the privilege of familiar as- 
sociation with certain kinds of people is 
expensive. There may be places you can- 
not live in to advantage, and people you 
cannot play with to advantage, for much 
less than fifty thousand dollars a year. 
If you are a fool, and have no particular 
standard of living of your own, and your 
happiness depends on having what other 
people have and doing what other people 
do, and if it is necessary to you that 
those other people shall be people of the 

[113] 



RICHES 

first fashion, of course there is no saying 
how much will be enough for you. Sad 
to say, we are almost all a little foolish 
about wanting to have what our associates 
have, and in wanting to include among 
our associates pleasant, decorative people 
whose maintenance is expensive. But if 
we are only moderately foolish, and have 
some hard sense to fall back on, and some 
standards of our own, and some personal 
resources for our entertainment, there will 
be an imaginable income for each of us 
that will be about enough. Rich people, 
who are used to the refinements and mate- 
rial luxuries of life, command some ex- 
ceedingly valuable privileges. They can 
marry when they get ready, live comfort- 
ably, have servants who save their time 
and strength, exercise hospitality, raise as 
many children as they find practicable or 
convenient, educate them in the best 
schools, and give them a fair start in life. 
They can command a certain amount of 

[114] 



RICHES 

leisure, can travel, and to a certain ex- 
tent can be their own masters. A mod- 
erate annual income, varying according 
to the locality, will pay for all these ad- 
vantageous privileges in their simpler 
forms. Anthony Hope's three thousand 
pounds a year will do it; easily in some 
places ; with good management anywhere. 
Such an income commands for a family 
pretty much all the great advantages of 
condition that are in the market, and 
most of the highly desirable things can 
be had for a great deal less. Parents who 
command such an income can do every- 
thing for three or four children that is to 
their advantage up to the time they marry, 
and can even provide them with modest 
incomes of their own when they set up 
for themselves. Heads of American fam- 
ilies, with not more than four children, 
and with incomes of fifteen thousand dol- 
lars a year, have got so nearly as much 
money as is good for them that they 

[115] 



RICHES 

can well afford to be particular about 
what they do to make their incomes 
bigger. 

But fifteen thousand dollars a year is 
not riches. Most of our countrymen 
whose efforts to be hastily rich have met 
with so much recent reprobation have 
long ago passed the fifteen thousand dol- 
lars a year point, and would deride the 
idea of such an income being about 
enough. What they plan and plot and 
sweat and gamble and finally squirm to 
acquire, is an income that bears no real 
relation to anything that can fairly be 
called a need, and an aggregation of capi- 
tal that will produce such an income. 
There is no such thing in our day as being 
rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The 
dreams of avarice have grown since Dr. 
Johnson's time; have grown enormously 
indeed since Dumas wrote of Monte 
Cristo. Our contemporary idea of riches 
begins about where Dr. Johnson left off. 

[116] 



RICHES 

A good big fortune is an interesting 
phenomenon, and a very interesting factor 
in civilization. I should be sorry to see 
big fortunes go so much out of fashion 
that nobody would any longer care to 
heap one up. If nobody built palaces, 
and made a market for the larger sizes of 
diamonds and the best pictures, and navi- 
gated the sea in big yachts and the land 
in automobiles thirty feet long, — if no- 
body, so to speak, had money to throw 
at birds, and threw it, life would not be 
nearly so lively and decorative as it is. I 
had almost rather, if I were quit of all 
personal responsibility about it, that some 
people hogged great fortunes than that 
there should be none. And I had a great 
deal rather that a due provision of big 
fortunes should be acquired in fit ways by 
fit men. Few of us, I think, object to big 
fortunes 'per se. We do not want too great 
a proportion of the national wealth to 
get into too few hands, as has happened 

[117] 



RICHES 

already, and is happening more and more. 
We do not want our laws, or the breach of 
them, to give an unfair advantage to the 
very rich who want to be richer, at the 
cost of the poor. But to fortunes legiti- 
mately won by men fit to win them, who 
merely levy lawful tribute on benefits con- 
ferred on the community, we have no ob- 
jection at all. Such fortunes are the signs 
of general prosperity. We like to see 
them grow, and admire the spending of 
them in the same spirit in which we ad- 
mire the lavish diffusion of sunshine. 
There is no objection to riches, then, pro- 
vided the right men gather them in the 
right ways. 

Who, then, are the right men, and 
what ways are legitimate ? 

There are a good many people who 
are of some consequence in the world if 
they are rich, and of very little conse- 
quence if they are not. One cannot 
blame such people for trying to get rich. 

[118] 



RICHES 

Riches mean so much to them! They 
are their only means of advertisement. 
They win them consideration. They put 
them in the way of being amused and 
entertained. It is a profound satisfaction 
to them to have money, even though they 
do not spend it. They may even find 
pleasure in giving it away. If by saving 
and bargaining and hard work and 
shrewd investment they can get together 
fortunes, let us wish them joy of them. 
Their money is capital if they do not 
spend it, and it is apt to do somebody 
some good if they do. If they hand it 
down to their descendants, there goes 
with it the power to command leisure and 
education and a choice of service, and 
possibly among the descendants there 
may be some who will use such powers to 
advantage. Accumulated money which 
enables lucky individuals of the rising 
generation to get a thorough preparation 
for the work of life, and which relieves 

[119] 



RICHES 

some individuals altogether from the ne- 
cessity of earning money, may be of vast 
service to a country like ours which every 
day abounds more in work most necessary 
to be well done, — work which no man 
who must earn his living can do without 
great sacrifices. 

By process of accumulation and invest- 
ment a good many people of moderate 
ability and saving habits get lawfully 
rich in a humdrum way without making 
any stir about it. There is no fault to be 
found with them. The other great group 
of lawful fortune builders are the great 
leaders of industry; the great financiers, 
the great railroad builders, the great trad- 
ers and manufacturers. With such men, 
after they have progressed a certain dis- 
tance, money usually becomes more an 
incident of activity than an aim. When 
they have won abundant fortunes, they 
still go on, not because they greatly care 
for more money, but because things of 

[120] 



RICHES 

the sort they have been doing are the only 
interesting things they know how to do. 
Their lives are permanently shaped, and 
they must live them out actively on the 
lines laid down by their past, or be laid 
off and rust. When they undertake new 
enterprises, they try to provide that they 
shall be profitable, not necessarily be- 
cause they want more money, but because 
it is one of the rules of the game they play 
that enterprises they put hand to shall be 
profitable. A great commercial enter- 
prise that does not pay is a machine that 
will not work. It is a failure, and there is 
no fun in failures. 

To these born chieftains of commerce 
it comes natural to get rich. They take 
it in their stride. The money-making 
habit is apt to run away with them, and 
concentration on one great phase of en- 
deavour is apt to leave the remnant of 
atrophied powers that one sees in most 
specialists. The need often felt of fight- 

[121] 



RICHES 

ing the devil with fire breeds in them a 
disposition to fight with fire when the op- 
ponent is not the devil. The great fort- 
une builders are usually not absolutely 
nice in their methods, and some of them 
are rascals. Out on the rascals! but for 
the rest, we must judge them by the stand- 
ard of bridge builders and not of watch- 
makers. If they are true money-makers; 
if they create wealth and not merely di- 
vert it and sweat it, there is no cause to 
grudge them the tribute they levy. 

A valuable thing in a family is one of 
these colossal money-makers. Time was 
when we used to believe the adage about 
its being three generations from shirt- 
sleeves to shirt-sleeves. I do not think 
it was ever literally sound, for though in 
earlier days the accumulations of a for- 
tune builder often ran pretty well out be- 
fore his grandchildren got through with 
them, the third generation seldom got 
back to manual labor. A fortune in a 



RICHES 

family raises the standard of living and of 
expectation for that family, forms for it 
associations of worldly advantage, and 
teaches it a good many things that are of 
value. The members of a family that has 
once been pulled out of the ruck of hu- 
manity in that way, and kept out for a 
considerable time, are apt to make a hard 
fight to hold the place they have had. 
They may get back to work ; they usually 
do; but it is apt to be a more profitable 
grade of work than is commonly done in 
shirt-sleeves. 

Moreover, the great fortunes of this 
generation are so enormous that there is 
no visible prospect of shirt-sleeves for the 
heirs of them. Fortunes of even fifty mil- 
lions will stand a great deal of foolishness 
in young heirs, and most of the heirs of 
such fortunes who come under contem- 
porary observation are not particularly 
foolish about dissipating money. Some 
of them are shrewd and ambitious, and 

[123] 



RICHES 

give more concern as money-getters than 
as money-spenders, and others merely 
find their incomes ample for such amuse- 
ments and expenditures as they crave, and 
live within them. 

So there are people who seem fit to 
gather riches, some because that seems as 
profitable a use as any to make of their 
time, others because riches are a natural 
incident of valuable services that they 
have had the talent and the energy to 
render. It is the money-getting of the 
unfit that makes the scandals. The 
money the various kinds of gamblers get 
is simply diverted from other holders; 
the money the grafters get is stolen from 
the people ; the money made out of fran- 
chises corruptly obtained is of the same 
sort. The patent medicine money has a very 
fragile claim to respect ; the money made 
by skinning stockholders or policy-holders 
is dear at the price; and so, generally, is 
the profit that results from the transfer of 

[124] 



RICHES 

worthless articles — be they stocks, mines, 
patent medicine, tips, or what — ^for a 
valuable consideration. What we need 
to keep us straight in our money-getting 
enterprises is a high valuation of conduct 
and character as compared with riches, 
and a sincere appreciation that it makes 
more for happiness to do good work, espe- 
cially if it is done for good pay, than to 
get hold of money without rendering a 
due equivalent. 

We are not so universally money-mad 
as we may seem. The elder Agassiz was 
not the only man in this country who 
ever felt that he had not time to make 
money. The longing for riches is 
not universally a predominant passion. 
Thousands of men feel that money-getting 
is not primarily their calling, and would 
not leave the work they love and pay the 
price in time and concentrated effort if 
ever so good a chance was offered them 
of a fortune honestly won. The man in 

[125] 



RICHES 

whom the money-hunger is so strong and 
effectual that he is willing to devote his 
life to satisfying it is a very exceptional 
man. Most of us hate to save, and the 
pleasure or profit of the hour looks bigger 
to us than that of the remote future. 
Moreover, to almost all the leading 
preachers, doctors, and schoolmasters, 
and to many of the editors, painters, 
architects, engineers, lawyers, and big 
politicians, money, though important, is 
a secondary consideration. They want 
to make a living, and much prefer that it 
shall be a good one, but professional suc- 
cess and reputation is of more value to 
them than superfluous riches. And why 
not! Is it not a much more satisfying 
thing to be a living force, master of a 
great profession or a great art, or a pub- 
lic leader, than to be merely the possessor 
of riches ? 

The great check on the value of riches 
to any man is that we human creatures 

[126] 



RICHES 

have only one set of time, one body, one 
mind, and one soul, apiece. We all, no 
matter what our means are^ have the use 
of twenty-four hours, and no more, every 
day. About eight hours we have to sleep. 
How we shall invest the other s.ixteen is 
the great problem of our lives. We can 
only do one set of things in any given 
period of time. If we have a million dol- 
lars a year, we can do things that we can- 
not do on one thousand, or ten, or twenty 
thousand a year. They will be differ- 
ent things, but there is no assurance at 
all that they will be better things or more 
entertaining, or more useful or improv- 
ing. And we cannot do both. If we put 
in our one set of time in a million-dollar 
occupation, we have to forego most of 
the thousand-dollar occupations. If we 
trail around Europe in an automobile, 
we cannot be at home reading books, 
and working at our trade or in our gar- 
den, or talking to our friends. Our good 

[127] 



RICHES 

friend with a million dollars a year can- 
not eat much more or better food, or 
drink much more or better drinks, than 
we can. If he does, he will be sorry. He 
can have more places to live in, and enor- 
mously more and handsomer apparatus 
of living, but he cannot live in more than 
one place at once, and too much appara- 
tus is a bother. He can make himself 
comfortable, and live healthfully. So 
can we. He can have all the leisure he 
wants, can go where he likes, and stay as 
long as he will. He has the better of us 
there. We have the better of him in hav- 
ing the daily excitement and discipline of 
making a living. It is a great game, — 
that game of making a living, — full of 
chances and hazards, hopes, surprises, 
thrills, disappointments, and satisfac- 
tions. Our million-a-year friend misses 
that. We may beat him in discipline, 
too. We are apt to get, more than he 
does, the salutary discipline of steady 

[ 128 ] 



RICHES 

work, of self-denial, of effort. That is 
enormously valuable to soul, body, and 
mind. He can't buy it. We get it 
thrown in with our daily bread. 

We are as likely to marry to our taste 
and live happily in the domesticated state 
as he is. We have rather better chances 
than he of raising our children well. We 
are as likely as he to have good friends 
worth having, and to find pleasure in 
them. Great riches tend to limit their 
possessors to the society of people who 
are rich, not because the rich love the 
rich better than they do other folks, but 
because their scale and habits of living 
usually take them where the rich people 
are, or where the poorer people cannot 
conveniently sojourn. If the steam-yacht 
people play more or less with other steam- 
yacht people in the yachting season, it is 
because the steam-yacht people are there, 
and the other people are not. At any 
rate, in this country great riches seem 

[129] 



RICHES 

more likely to limit their possessors' 
command of agreeable society than to 
extend it. 

Another trouble about some of cur 
extremely rich people is that no definite 
job goes with their money. If they 
choose, they can invest everything they 
have in such a way as to have no respon- 
sibility about the management of any 
business, and nothing to do except to 
gather in their dividend checks and spend 
or reinvest their money. That is one 
result of incorporating all the great busi- 
nesses of the country. When money 
necessarily went into land, the rich had 
duties that were incident to their posses- 
sions. They might neglect them, but 
they had them. Now they can easily 
manage so as to have no duties connected 
with property that an efficient clerk can- 
not transact. If they do so manage, it 
leaves them rather lonely and unimpor- 
tant, outside the great current of human 

[1301 



RICHES 

hopes and activities. If they do not like 
that, and insist on touching elbows with 
their fellows, there is no way for it but 
to butt into the game, take chances and 
risks, make sacrifices of ease and leisure, 
and work like poor people. 

Great riches, carrying with them enor- 
mous possibilities of self-indulgence, may 
fairly be considered as a sort of poison 
which ruins a certain proportion of those 
who are exposed to it, though strong con- 
stitutions survive. As rum destroys sav- 
ages, so wealth tends to destroy persons 
— especially young ones — whom use and 
training have not gradually made im- 
mune to its effects. How that is, may 
readily be noticed in observing the effects 
of newly won wealth on the families of 
the winners. It is a rare man, and usu- 
ally one very much blessed in his wife, 
who can combine with the ability that 
w^ns him riches the sagacity to train 
children born in comparative poverty so 
[131] 



RICHES 

that they will benefit by a rapid and radi- 
cal improvement in his circumstances. 

Another drawback to riches is that, the 
two things that most of us most dread 
being poverty and that spiritual ruin 
which we call damnation, the elimination 
of poverty takes away a buffer, and, leav- 
ing damnation our only great bugbear, 
brings the dread of it unpleasantly near. 
Not this drawback, though, nor fears for 
our children, nor any of the other objec- 
tions to being rich, so fiercely daunt us 
but that our fortitude is easily equal to the 
perils of all of them if honourable afllu- 
ence comes our way. It is enough if we 
realize that riches, whatever their charm 
and their value, are not a panacea for the 
evils of life; that happiness depends on 
work, health, character, disposition, train- 
ing, and a great many other things be- 
sides income, and that, so far as happi- 
ness is concerned, enough money, or 
somewhat less than enough, puts us in 

[ 132 ] 



RICHES 

just about as good a case to achieve it 
as though we were rich. To live our 
lives, to get out what is in us, to do our 
share of the world's work, and live 
brotherly with our fellows — that is what 
we are here for. If riches are an inci- 
dent of that course of life, they are a 
good incident. If the chase after them 
lures us away from the fulfilment of 
our primary obligations to our Maker, 
our neighbour, and ourselves, we are cer- 
tainly losers by it : losers if it fails ; losers 
not less if, succeeding, we lose the Christ- 
mas out of our year, the Christmas spirit 
out of our lives. 

December, 1905. 



[138] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

A New Englander, who has come 
back to visit Massachusetts after living 
twenty years in Idaho and Washington 
(state), writes to a Massachusetts paper 
that he finds many and great changes, 
but nothing so wonderful as the changed 
religious conditions. He recalls that just 
before he left home his mother's brother 
went over to the Roman Catholic Church, 
and he remembers the resulting conster- 
nation in the family. Now, visiting a 
near relative of his father, he is told that 
the likeliest son of the family is engaged 
to marry an Irish girl, a Catholic, and as 
a preliminary to marriage is under 
instruction by a priest with a view of 
joining the Roman Catholic Church. "I 
asked the father," he says, "if it was by 
his consent. His reply was, 'To be sure, 

[134] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

and with his mother's consent as well. 
In fact, when we remember that we have 
two sons so taken up with business and 
lodge duties as to have no time or care 
for church, and one of them divorced 
twice, and a daughter devoted to Chris- 
tian Science, we regard the girl in the 
case as a means of grace from God for 
the boy.'" The boy being questioned, 
said: "I am going to be a Catholic, but 
what of it ? I am only returning to the 
Church that made good Christians out 
of our forefathers before we were left 
at the mercy of every curbstone orator 
with a message." 

No wonder the homing New Englander 
was astonished at the changes he found 
in religious conditions. Such an attitude 
as that in New England parents of the 
old stock towards the Roman Catholic 
Church is fit to stir reflection. The rea- 
sons for it are briefly indicated in the 
little story. It was much that the boy's 

[135] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

parents liked the girl, but the two sons 
who had no time for church (though one 
of them had found time to be twice 
divorced) and the Christian Science 
daughter were the powerful factors in 
reconciling the parents to the other boy's 
course. The parents did not like the 
character that was making in their family 
and were willing to try a new prescription 
for the cure of New England souls. The 
observer who reports the case says it 
may be an unusual one, and that he 
would not write about it if it were not 
that he had attended service in seventeen 
churches since he had been East, and 
"the handful present in each" made him 
want to stir New England up to develop 
"a more united, vigourous, intelligent, 
and Christian Protestantism, and then 
come West and help us." 

It is no trouble to guess that some kind 
of religion is going to grow vigourously 
in our country, and that if the prevailing 

[136] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

forms of Protestantism don't hold their 
old fields and do their old work some- 
thing else will take their place. There 
must be something to shape character 
and hold it true to a standard. Out of 
the ethical disturbance which has pre- 
vailed so fiercely of late — the dissatisfac- 
tion with the methods which have lately 
brought commercial success, the concern 
at the increase of divorce, the discussion 
of socialism, and the disposition to ex- 
periment with various new laws to re- 
strain the powers of the powerful and the 
avarice of the greedy — there is likely to 
result some closer examination by per- 
plexed but conservative persons of the 
means of regulating human character 
from the inside. People, like the rela- 
tives of the man who wrote the letter to 
the Massachusetts paper, who have taken 
some pains to raise some children, are 
instinctively interested in the permanency 
of their line. They want their children 

[137] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

not only to do well, but to reproduce 
their kind, an orderly, faithful kind, 
cleaving to righteousness, that will keep 
alive in the earth. 

Which lasts longer in a family, char- 
acter or money ? It is not quite a simple 
question, because money sometimes lasts 
pretty well and character sometimes runs 
out, and because families in which char- 
acter is strong are apt, first or last, to 
develop their share of successful money- 
getters. Nevertheless, though it often 
seems as if there was nothing like a hand- 
some pot of money for establishing a family 
on a firm basis, I think character beats 
money in keeping families alive. Sound 
stocks are wonderfully durable and last 
through adversities till better times come 
round. Of that there are interesting evi- 
dences to be gathered by wholesale from 
the story of the South since the Civil War. 
New England has had character, not only 
for home use, but for wide distribution. 

[138] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

She has scattered it Westward as far as the 
land stretches. It has brought her children 
so much money that one wonders whether 
she has not cashed in too much of it. 

Indeed it is a fair question whether 
American character generally — there is 
no reason to single out New England — 
has not been much too extensively cashed 
in. If we have got the money and no 
longer have the character, we are undoubt- 
edly poorer for the trade, and less likely 
to last and hold our own in the world. 

And the case is all the worse if it is true 
that the old machinery, and especially the 
religious machinery, by which character 
used to be moulded and strengthened, 
has broken down. There is no use at all 
— is there ? — in raising families of children 
who will spend money, scoot about in 
devil wagons, shirk work, and get divorces 
whenever the mood strikes them. There 
is small profit for the human race in folks 
of that sort, and not much in that other 

[139] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

sort whose representatives are deadly 
bent on pecuniary gain, no matter how. 
The Americans are intelligent and very 
ambitious. If American character is run- 
ning out or being cashed in at a rate that 
imperils the perpetuation of the great, 
national American family, it must be that 
they will be smart enough to see it and to 
give attention strenuously to the cultiva- 
tion of fidelity and righteousness, as valu- 
ables more indispensable to permanency 
than dividend-paying securities, or even 
cash. And if, for example, the Americans 
conclude that they have got to have more 
religion if they are to keep their moral 
health, they certainly will have it, though 
just what particular brand of Christian 
religion it will be I do not know. 

It is very wholesome and encouraging 
for any one who lives in a great city where 
all the apparatus of wealth and extrava- 
gant living is constantly paraded before 
him, to take in a village newspaper from 

[140] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

somewhere and regularly read its local 
news, that brings constantly home to him 
the simpler life conserved in its simplicity 
by circumstances that are stronger than 
whim or preference. After we have bent 
our minds a good deal to the considera- 
tion of such newspaper questions as 
whether $50,000 a year is as large a salary 
as any insurance company's president 
ought to be paid, it is wholesome for us 
to be reminded how very small a corner 
of our national world is practically affected 
by such questions, and how overwhelming 
in comparative numbers is the crowd 
whose life from beginning to end is main- 
tained on incomes much too insigniiScant 
to embarrass anybody's reflections. It is 
the life of that great crowd of average 
people that is important to a country. 
The rich people and the earners or win- 
ners of the fiifty-thousand-dollar incomes 
are chiefly important in their relation to 
that larger mass. 

[141] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

But that relation is important. The 
more prospered people in our country in- 
clude a large share of the country's natu- 
ral leadership and management. For 
about forty years — since the Civil War — 
getting rich has been about the most at- 
tractive exercise that has offered in this 
country. Conditions have been wonder- 
fully favourable to it. Since the slavery 
question was settled no general political 
issue has arisen that has matched it in 
power to compel the attention and devo- 
tion of citizens. The most aggressive 
and ablest of our people have bent their 
energies to the commercial development 
of the country and to the gathering of the 
riches attending it, without serious, whole- 
sale distraction to ethical or political con- 
cerns. The pecuniary rewards of their 
efforts have been so enormous that money- 
getting has overshadowed all the other 
objects of endeavour. 

The successful business man and his 

[142] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

heirs have come to sit at the head of the 
table, and the chief and most profitable 
concern of most of the other workers has 
come to be to minister unto them. The 
whole group of professional workers has 
dropped in the social scale relatively to the 
successful men of affairs. The rise in the 
scale of living and the very great increase 
in the cost of it, have made poor men of 
the judges, the college professors, the 
schoolmasters, the officers of the army 
and navy, the ministers, and most of the 
lawyers and the doctors. The doctors 
have kept their place better than any of 
the other professional men, because their 
profession is constantly growing in im- 
portance, but the profession of law has 
progressed a long way toward being a 
mere money-getting business, and has 
lost in independence and in attractive- 
ness to aspiring men. The man who is 
most sure nowadays that he has chosen a 
good trade in which the shining hours 

[143] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

will duly profit him seems to be the stock 
broker. "Don't make a lawyer of your 
boy," said an admirable lawyer the other 
day; "make ,a banker of him. That is 
the only trade that is egregiously overpaid 
just now." 

We see then that for years the current 
toward money-making has set very strong 
and run very deep, and somewhat to the 
detriment of the occupations in which 
money-making is only an important inci- 
dent and not the central aim. Is there any- 
thing at work to check that tendency and 
foster a better distribution of the talent 
and best brains of the country so that some 
necessary works that seem neglected just 
now may get better attention.^ I think 
there are such influences moving. There 
has been so much money slopped about of 
very recent years that everybody is getting 
pretty well used to it, and its possession 
no longer excites the awe that it did when 
large collections of it were scarcer. Big 

[144] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

people with big incomes make money re- 
spected, but little people with big incomes 
tend to make it more or less derided. So 
many kinds of Americans have got money 
nowadays that the most convenient 
method of classifying them has come to 
be to divide them all into two groups, those 
who still live with their wives and those 
who don't. When we see people made 
happy, according to our standards of hap- 
piness, by pecuniary enlargement, it dis- 
poses us toward special effort after pecu- 
niary enlargement for ourselves and our 
children, but when we see people whose 
struggles and sacrifices have brought them 
money to the detriment of their conduct 
and their reputations, and see them having 
no fun that is attractive to us, it disposes 
us towards contentment with a humbler 
pecuniary lot. 

Can it be denied that examples of this 
latter sort have been lavished on us ? Into 
what extraordinary female depositories 

[145] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

have we lately seen the loot of cities sink! 
In other lands men of great possessions go 
to courts to confer with kings, but here 
they go to court and go again to testify 
where they got what they have and whose 
it was. It seems a wearing life. And 
the Wall Street end of it, the "big men" 
who buy when stocks are low, and loose 
the purse strings of the banks, inviting 
speculation, and sell at the top — it seems 
a bit sordid; and the Newport end of it, 
which may indeed have its fair aspects 
and its pleasures, seems a bit aimless. Is 
the Newport habit worth any wise per- 
son's efforts to attain for himself ? Would 
he covet it for his children ? Is it worth 
while to be a broker in order to bring up 
a son to that calling ? Somehow, of very 
recent years, our more fortunate fellow- 
citizens seem not to have made good. 
Their felicities excite more derision than 
envy. It even seems as if the impression 
were being diffused that a considerably 
r 146 1 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

better life than theirs is within the reach 
of talent and character and energy, a Hfe 
far less expensive but with very much 
more substantial satisfactions. 

The more the impression gets about 
that headlong money-getting is not in its 
final results all that it has been cracked 
up to be, and that there are more re- 
munerative ways of putting in one's life, 
the more diversion we may hope to see of 
the energies of able young men to other 
employments. Especially we may hope 
that of the young men of brains who have 
money enough — as many of them now 
have by inheritance — more and more will 
be constrained to use their powers and 
the leisure their fortunes give them rather 
for the raising of the standard of char- 
acter, integrity, and morality in the coun- 
try, than for its commercial development. 
There is no danger that commercial de- 
velopment will be neglected. That is too 
highly paid a service ever to be overlooked. 

[147] 



CHARACTER AND MONEY 

But the other form of service needs culti- 
vation. To think sound thoughts and 
diffuse them, to raise the standards of 
conduct and to help make them effective 
— those are labours of the first importance 
to the country, and yet not likely to be 
bountifully paid for in money. It is 
true the schoolmaster is abroad, but the 
curbstone orator with a message dogs his 
heels, and the message, misleading as it 
may be, stands a good chance to be re- 
ceived if there is a dearth of strong voices 
to speak a better. 



[148 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

It is a current custom in many of the 
colleges to gather the new students at the 
beginning of the year and set forth the 
most judicious gentlemen obtainable to 
bid them welcome and make wise dis- 
course to them about the new world they 
have come into, and how they may best 
assimilate its best offerings. They do 
this every fall at Harvard, and last Octo- 
ber President Eliot, coming as the last of 
the speakers who addressed the new- 
comers in the Sanders Theater, imparted 
to them some true and timely ideas about 
being gentlemen in the democratic fashion 
proper to this untrammelled land. Dis- 
cussing the characteristics of a gentleman 
in democratic society, he submitted that 
he should be gentle of speech, quiet of 
demeanour, a serene person who does not 

[149] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

bluster, or bustle, or hurry, or vociferate, 
but who pays attention with the intent 
mind which is requisite to effectiveness. 
And he accorded him the disposition to 
see the superiorities in persons rather 
than their inferiorities, and a preference 
for the society of his superiors. And he 
held that he should have a generous spirit, 
conforming his life to his resources, 
avoiding both lavishness and parsimony. 
He should be considerate, too, especially 
toward those who are in any way in his 
power, and should scrupulously avoid 
hurting any one weaker than himself. 
He even denied him the precious privilege 
of being lazy. His democratic gentle- 
man must be a power, a worker, a disin- 
terested labourer in the service of others; 
not a weakling or a mere pleasure-seeker, 
but a strong and hard-working man. 
There are five grades of scholarship at 
Harvard. The middle grade is "C." 
Dr. Eliot quoted a remark that he had 

[150] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

heard, that the gentleman's mark was 
*'C." "Can there be," he said, *'a stu- 
pider or falser idea of a gentleman than 
that? He is not to be an effective and 
strong worker, not to be a man with a 
strong grip and high purpose, but an in- 
different, good-for-nothing, luxurious per- 
son idling through the precious years of 
college life!" 

The best that can be said for the foolish 
notion that "C" is "the gentleman's 
mark" is that "C" is a better mark than 
"D," and at least implies that the young 
gentleman is paying enough attention to 
his scholastic duties to maintain his con- 
nection with the college. Moreover, I 
suppose that there are a good many young 
fellows in a big college, who, while they 
care little about marks or academic hon- 
ours, and are content if in their scholar- 
ship they are merely safe, are by no means 
good-for-nothing, nor mere luxurious 
idlers, but are true, if leisurely, seekers 

[151] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

after education, and are getting in fair 
measure what they seek. At Oxford 
they think a good deal of the civilizing 
usefulness of the university life more or 
less irrespective of academic distinctions. 
Mr. Rhodes was strongly impressed with 
the value of it when he endowed the 
Rhodes' scholarships, as to which, and 
their purpose, an Oxford correspondent 
says in a recent letter to the London 
Telegraph: "Oxford teaches a lesson 
which no young community learns — the 
truth, namely, that education is not ex- 
clusively or mainly intellectual, but social 
and moral, in the best sense of the word, 
a discipline in the way to live. I am not 
sure that the German will ever find this 
out, but the American and the Colonial 
cannot fail to gain therefrom much ad- 
vantage." Now it is conceivable, how- 
ever unlikely, that some of Dr. Eliot's 
young men who are content with ''C's" 
are learning this lesson in so fai as the 

[152] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

institution they frequent can impart it. 
Moreover, is it not true that there is more 
than one process of development, and that 
while one likely youth begins with effi- 
ciency and diligence and gradually adds 
to them sweetness and light and grace, 
another of a different nature and less 
energetic may acquire grace earlier, and 
diligence and efficiency by a slower and 
more gradual process. It seems to me 
that I have seen both of these processes in 
action, that I have known grade "A" 
men who seemed cold-hearted in their 
youth to develop sympathies and sweet- 
ness in their maturity, and lads who were 
genial and lazy in college to acquire, under 
constraint of necessity or ambition, hab- 
its of pertinacious diligence in later life. 

Moreover, I notice that Pastor Wagner, 
in the treatise that is just now so warmly 
pressed upon the attention of mankind, 
lays stress upon the value of joyousness, 
and urges the cultivation of it as one of 

[153] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

the things that are indispensable to pro- 
fitable living. Maybe some of our young 
grade *'C" brethren are cultivating joy- 
ousness, and laying up some store of it 
against a day when they may be too busy 
to play. Dr. Eliot has said that the thing 
that more commonly than any other thing 
checks the development of men's minds is 
the necessity of making a living. That 
pursuit is as apt to check the cultivation 
of joyousness as of any other branch of 
the humanities. 

A big college is a microcosm, and many 
men of many minds are seeking various 
things there. There are some other good 
things to be had there, as the Oxford cor- 
respondent says, besides the intellectual 
training. These other good things are 
much more likely to be added to the good 
scholars than to the poor ones, but it 
would be a pity if the good scholars 
monopolized them all. I don't think 
they do. In a big college like Harvard 

[ 154 1 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

one considerable class of students are 
working for their immediate bread and 
butter. If they do well enough in their 
studies, they get scholarships while they 
are in college, and find good chances to 
earn their livings as soon as they get out. 
With this group, already facing the seri- 
ous work of life, the motive for immediate 
exertion is somewhat stronger than with 
the other large group whose circum- 
stances are easier. If the poorer youths 
are apt to beat most of the richer ones 
in marks, it is because they need to, and 
because they are exposed to fewer and 
less alluring distractions. On the social 
side of college life the richer youths have 
rather the better chance, and it is a chance 
to acquire some things that are valuable. 
I suppose it really pays some Harvard un- 
dergraduates to divert time and strength 
from scholastic duties to the Sisyphusian 
task of gaining ground against Yale, or 
trying to provide — against experience — 

[155] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

that a Harvard boat shall be more swiftly 
propelled down the Thames River than a 
similar boat from New Haven. And the 
social opportunities, the chance to live the 
life of the place, to like and be liked, to 
gossip, to discuss, to invite one's soul, 
surely they are valuable, too. I am not 
sure that the grade ''C" man who, with- 
out physical or moral sacrifices, duly im- 
proves them, does not get as much out of 
college as he would have got if he had 
studiously neglected them for "B's"or 
even *' A's." What he should do is to im- 
prove his social opportunities without neg- 
lecting his scholastic ones, and if he is able 
enough and has character enough he will. 
''The precious years of college life," as 
Dr. Eliot calls them, are precious for more 
reasons than one. First or last, it is prof- 
itable to have time to think. A grade 
"C" man who thinks — if any of them do 
think — may profit more by his mental 
operations than a grade "B" who thinks 

[156] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

less but gets better marks. And shall 
there not be time for the heart to swell 
and the imagination to expand ? If we 
are going to have old men who dream 
dreams, must we not have young men 
who see visions ? And unless our young 
men see visions and our old men dream 
dreams, what difference do w^e make or 
shall we ever make, in this world ? If I 
thought that a reasonable proportion of 
the grade " C" men were using their spare 
time in developing the spiritual quality, 
I would not worry overmuch about their 
marks. For it is that, the spiritual 
quality, which not only gives grace and 
ckarm to the democratic gentleman, but 
is an element of intelligence indispensable 
to any very high success. The men who 
lack it either cannot bring themselves to 
want the higher kind of success or can- 
not win it. 

And what is it ? It is not piety in the 
common sense; it is not necessarily re- 

[157] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

Hgiousness; but though it may be con- 
sistent with any kind of religion, I do not 
understand how it can be consistent with 
none. It may quaUfy the strenuous Ufe 
with all its vigorous physical and mental 
activities, or it may sustain and stimulate 
energies much less profuse. It is consist- 
ent with shrewdness and the money-get- 
ting gift, and with indifference to money; 
with thrift and with pecuniary careless- 
ness; with ambition and with modesty; 
with great powers and with lesser ones; 
but hardly with stupidity, for it is itself a 
quality of intelligence. Let us call it a 
certain grasp and comprehension of cer- 
tain truths, the knowledge of which is 
revealed to some babes, and denied to 
some of the learned; which comes more 
by conduct than by study, and more per- 
haps by breeding, or the grace of God, 
than either. Emerson had it. Lincoln 
had it. Roosevelt has it, jostled in among 
a crowd of other qualities, and it is one 

[158] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

thing that makes him hard to beat. 
McKinley had it, and the shrewd Hanna 
recognized it in him. It is pretty hard 
for a man to get to the White House with- 
out it, for it is an inspiring quaUty which 
human instinct recognizes, and to which 
in our country a vast concourse of voters 
are responsive. Some very able and 
ambitious poUticians have ultimately 
failed in leadership precisely for the rea- 
son that they lacked it, and the people 
found them out and would not follow 
them. Other exceedingly able politicians 
lacking or losing this quality, have ceased 
to be able to aspire, and have turned 
away from the service of the people be- 
cause they could not prize such rewards 
as it brought them. As American politi- 
cal parties stand now, it might be pos- 
sible for the Republicans to elect a Pres- 
ident in whom this quality was not 
especially apparent, but if there is to be 
another successful Democratic leader who 

[159] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

is to draw a majority of our voters unto 
him, he must have it. It is indispen- 
sable. No man will do who does not 
possess, and has not demonstrated that 
he possesses, this spiritual quality of com- 
prehending truth and acting, step by step, 
on his comprehension of it. No certified 
candidate, no sterilized ticket, will help 
the Democrats. Their coming leader 
must not only be possessed and borne 
along by the truth that is in him, but it 
must be sound and timely truth, the sort 
that will make the country 'whole ; not dis- 
tract it. 

It is idle to cry out against materialism, 
unless you offer something in place of it. 
The country will never really despond 
because it is getting too rich. None of us 
want to be any poorer than we can help 
except a very few of us who have a great 
deal too much money. And they don't 
seem to want to — not m real earnest — 
although some of them talk about it. 

[160] 



THE SPIRITUAL QUALITY 

But lots of US will forego excessive solici- 
tude for material gains if we can get any- 
thing that fills us more to our satisfac- 
tion. Nature abhors a vacuum. If 
ideals are lacking, material things must 
fill the void. But the only men who are 
really good at getting political ideals into 
marketable shape and making them seem 
profitable to voters are men who have this 
spiritual quality, who take counsel of the 
spirit, who have insight, and who do what 
they see, not for effect, but because they 
must; because their very blood constrains 
them; because they are possessed to act 
the truth they see, and other goods they 
might aspire to seem to them uninviting 
in comparison. 

February^ 1905 



[161] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

"Noise and Canned Food Life's Re- 
ward" was the newspaper headline of a 
dispatch from Chicago that told of the 
complaints of an Iowa doctor who came 
to Chicago last October to a medical con- 
vention. He came apparently without 
sentiments of special animosity toward 
life as it is lived, but the hotel that he 
went to assigned him a room that faced 
a Chicago institution called "the elevated 
loop," whereof the incessant noises mur- 
dered his sleep and distressed his nerves. 
Before the convention ended he addressed 
his medical brethren on existence as he 
had just found it. We live, he declared, 
amid shrieks, toots, bells, and yells. 
Everything is prepared, canned, and con- 
densed. We live in large cities, over- 
work, overworry, overeat, and under- 

[16£] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

sleep. We have no time for real rest and 
relaxation. We tear down as fast, or faster 
than we build up. We struggle through 
life day by day. We do not quietly live, 
but struggle at everything. Even in our 
play we struggle. We have records to 
smash in everything, and all must be 
hurry, noise, and excitement. The base- 
ball game, or the foot-ball game, is not a 
period of relaxation, but of keen anxiety 
as to whether the home team will win. 
Our food is prepared to please the palate 
rather than to nourish the body. It 
must be quickly cooked, even if its val- 
ue as food is lost. Our groceries are 
adulterated, our meats are embalmed, 
our butter is laundered. We choose soft 
foods that don't need to be chewed much. 
With all out-of-doors to choose abodes 
from, we huddle into cities, and shutting 
out the sunshine with a pall of smoke, live 
crowded and in dirt, dodge trolley cars 
and automobiles, move from flat to flat, 

[163] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

and never know what peace and quiet are 
until we reach our graves. What wonder 
that we are deficient in physical develop- 
ment, that our bones are small, our diges- 
tions poor, and that our impractical teeth 
are crowded into jaws too contracted for 
them, and that catarrh and other hyper- 
trophies are prevalent. 

Is it so bad as all that.^ I hope not. 
But good for the Iowa city doctor who 
relieved so much of his mind and produced 
so comprehensive a category of complaints 
against life as we Americans now live it. 
What are hypertrophies ? Do we have 
them.^ Why do we have them.? We 
have catarrh, but if noise is so large a 
part of current life's reward as Dr. Brady 
says, maybe our catarrhs are a protective 
dispensation to deafen us against the cur- 
rent din. No doubt life in a hotel bed- 
room on the elevated loop in Chicago 
seems a hurried, noisy thing to a beginner. 
The din of elevated railroads in cities is a 

ri64i 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

preposterous absurdity. There ought to 
be rubber tires on the car wheels or rubber 
cushions under the rails, or something to 
mitigate it. Nevertheless folks who live 
within the range of it are said soon to 
get used even to that. Maybe they live 
worse or die sooner because of it. I be- 
lieve it is agreed that life in great cities is 
exhausting to human material; that the 
English people, for instance, begins to 
show serious physical degeneration as the 
result of the crowded, shaded, and ill- 
nourished life of a large proportion of it 
in London and other big cities. Human 
material was made to be used up, and the 
idea of cities as the great furnaces where 
the country-made human coal is shovelled 
in to make wheels revolve, is not neces- 
sarily uneconomical, though it may be 
worked too hard. It is not to be expected 
of great cities that their populations shall 
be wholly self -perpetuating. They must 
not be Molochs, always absorbing human 

[165J 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

life and reproducing nothing; but it is 
legitimate enough that the absorption 
should exceed the reproduction, and that 
the difference should be made good, and 
more, by constant recruiting from out- 
side. 

"We struggle through life day by day," 
laments the Iowa doctor. "We do not 
quietly live, but struggle at everything." 
But it is no disparagement of life to call 
it a struggle. Unless it is something of a 
struggle, it is little worth. To struggle 
duly and seasonably, with proper periods 
of preparation, and due spells of rest and 
true recreation, is the ideal life. Who- 
ever succeeds in eliminating struggle, for 
himself or his children, out of life suc- 
ceeds in eliminating the very pith of 
existence. Without some degree of strug- 
gle there is nothing to be had that is of 
much value; not character, nor emi- 
nence in anything worth achieving, nor 
even any valuable measure of content- 

[166] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

ment. It need not be noisy; it need not 
be hasty. There need not, as a rule, be 
more than one day's fair allotment of 
struggle in a day. For my part, I sym- 
pathize with persons who do not want to 
begin their ordinary day's struggle too 
soon after breakfast, or have it continue 
later than six o'clock in the afternoon. 
But some time between one's meals the 
dial that is adjusted to one's energies 
should indicate that steam is up, and 
whatever kind of machinery he happens 
to have in him should be constrained to 
show what it can do. How long a daily 
run his works are equal to depends on 
the individual. Five hours' struggle is 
too much for some of us; ten hours' too 
little for others. Duration of struggle de- 
pends, too, on the ardour of it. I find 
that in foot-ball matches the length of the 
halves is adjusted to the age and strength 
of the contestants, and the length of time 
they have been in training. Young school- 

[167] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

boys play ten-minute halves at the begin- 
ning of the season and increase perhaps to 
twenty minutes ; whereas, for college lads 
the halves last half an hour. 

The instinctive appreciation that it is 
true that struggle is a proper part of life 
is doubtless at the bottom of the patron- 
age w^e accord to that same violent and 
objectionable game of foot-ball. We 
would not put up with it, I am sure, with 
all its incidents of thumps, broken bones, 
first aid to the injured, clots on the brain, 
twisted ankles and noses, hired players, 
distraction from study, overeagerness to 
win, spectacular ism, and expense, if we 
had not a deep conviction that struggle 
was indispensable to our kind of living, 
and that our kind of living was in the 
main the best kind for us. About two 
generations ago, and before that, it was 
the fashion for merchant princes to have 
their portraits painted at full length in 
great magnificence of dressing gowns and 

fl68l 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

slippers. You see such portraits of bene- 
factors of colleges hanging in college halls. 
Doubtless those merchants did in their 
day their share of struggling, but the side 
of life that they preferred to illustrate in 
paint was elegant repose. Imagine a 
successful merchant of our day having 
his portrait painted in a dressing gown! 
Was American life less impetuous in those 
dressing-gown times ? I suspect that men 
struggled just as hard then as now, but 
life was doubtless less noisy and somewhat 
more sedate. There was less coal smoke, 
less clang of steam-engines and machinery, 
no automobiles, telegraphs, and tele- 
phones, and less haste, but a thousand de- 
tails of life are handier, easier, and more 
wholesome now than then, and the aver- 
age duration of life itself is considerably 
longer. I suspect that it was because 
American life three generations ago was so 
amply furnished with hardships that the 
portrait painters emphasized the dressing- 

[169] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

gown-and-slippers side of it, and I sus- 
pect that it is because American life has 
since become so much easier that the 
struggle side of it is pushed to the fore 
now. 

The faults of foot-ball as we see it are 
the faults of life as we struggle in it. The 
great fault with foot-ball is the spirit which 
actuates some of the players. The great 
fault of American life is the same. There 
is no reason why foot- ball should not be 
generous, honest, and sweet-tempered even 
though it is rough. There is no reason 
why our daily struggle should not be gen- 
erous, honest, and even jocund. The 
lawful purpose in foot-ball is not to dis- 
able one's opponent, but to play the 
game under the rules, and to win by fair 
means or not at all. The lawful purpose 
in our contemporary struggle for existence 
is analogous to that. It is to struggle 
honestly under the rules ; to win what we 
may win by merit, and not by underhand 

[170] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

slugging, by secret rebates, lies, breaches 
of trust, something-for-nothing schemes, 
dirty work, and unlawful expedients. 

A dinner was given the other night to a 
man of talent who had won extraordinary 
success in one line of work, and was about 
to experiment in another. One speaker, 
paying his compliments to the guest of 
the company, spoke of the harmlessness of 
his career. And that was a feature of it 
worth noting. This man, strong in work- 
ing capacity and with great natural ability, 
had progressed steadily to the very top of 
his vocation. Incidentally, he had earned 
prodigious sums of money for a man of 
his profession. Incidentally, he had far 
outdone all rivals and competitors in his 
special field. But his success had all been 
won under the rules. His struggle had 
been always to better his own work, to 
compel himself to severer efforts, to de- 
velop higher ideals; never to deprive a 
rival of any chance that a fair field offered. 

[171] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

Favouritism had never helped him; the 
inside track had had no value to him. He 
had won on his merits, and his success 
had been not merely harmless, but helpful 
and inspiring to the whole competition. 
That is what success ought to be. To 
win a purse with a ringer isn't success. 
It is larceny. And to win a fortune, great 
or small, by unlawful, unfair, and under- 
hand means is something of very much 
the same sort. 

No reasonable amount of struggle, 
under the rules, is going to hurt our gen- 
eration of Americans. It will do them 
good. As for hurry and living in cities, 
they should order their lives so that they 
need not hurry so much, and they should 
make their cities better to live in, and live 
away from them more. Both of these last 
desirable things are in process of rapid 
accomplishment. Parks large and small, 
building laws, tenement-house commis- 
sions, and the like are making our great 

[172] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

cities much better to live in, and an ex- 
traordinary development of means of 
transportation is making it easier and 
cheaper to get out of them. Hurry all 
day long is exhausting, but to go briskly 
about one's business and home again after 
it may be merely a phase of stimulating 
exercise. 

And are noise and canned food to be 
our life's reward ? Throw in newspapers, 
too, they are as much maligned as any- 
thing. The newspapers, many of them, 
are about the best and most stimulating 
reading obtainable, albeit they should not 
be the only things read. The canned 
food adds a variety to our national diet 
that was lacking when Samuel J. Tilden 
tried to go to Yale College and had to 
leave because he could get nothing to eat 
that his impaired digestion was equal to. 
As to the noise, some degree of that is an 
incident of human society. Some of our 
towns are much too noisy. I hope and 

[173] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

believe that they will improve in that par- 
ticular. But after all there is an un- 
rivalled attraction about human society 
and it is considerably wholesome. It 
takes superior people to thrive on soli- 
tude even with quiet thrown in. Feebler 
folk have been known to degenerate even 
in the blessed country. It is no more pos- 
sible in these days to stop the country 
people from coming to town than to stop 
the rivers from flowing to the sea. The 
cities offer the best opportunities to the 
people who are qualified to improve them. 
The cities are the great markets for talent 
and skill as well as for commodities. 
They would be badly off if the energy 
that makes them hum were not perpetu- 
ally reinforced out of the great country 
reservoirs. And the country would be a 
worse place if the superfluous vigour that 
is bred there had not the cities in which 
to spend itself. To get to some town is 
the natural and legitimate aspiration of a 

[174] 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

considerable proportion of the sons and 
daughters of American farmers. But as 
the waters that run to the sea are carried 
back by the process of evaporation, so 
there must be, as our cities grow greater, 
a return current out of them countryward 
for the people for whom town life is no 
longer profitable, and whose nerves and 
thews need nature's medication. There 
is such a current as it is. People who get 
rich in town promptly provide themselves 
with country homes, and spend more and 
more of the year in them as their years 
increase and their strength declines. But 
for the people who don't get rich the com- 
bination, or the transition, is not so easy. 
A due proportion of the people who are 
game to stand more noise, canned food, 
and struggle in their lives, and who ought 
to get to town, will get there. That 
process will take care of itself. The other 
process — to send back into the country the 
families, and especially the children, who 

[1751 



NOISE AND CANNED FOOD 

have had more continuous city life th«an 
is good for them — needs a good deal of 
outside assistance, and gets some, though 
not yet as much as it requires. 



[176] 



DIVORCE 

In the course of the last twenty years 
in Massachusetts the annual number of 
divorces has doubled relatively to the 
annual number of marriages. Twenty 
years ago about one Ma^achusetts mar- 
riage in thirty ended in a divorce. In 
1902 the ratio of divorces to marriages was 
one to 17.4; in 1903, one to 15.6; in 
1904, one to 15.3. I do not know that 
Massachusetts vaunts herself openly on 
being the most civilized State in the 
Union, but if she should, she could make 
out a pretty strong case in support of her 
vaunt. At any rate, she has her due pro- 
portion of good people, and has good 
divorce laws, and to accept her as a 
representative State, and her divorce ex- 
perience as a representative experience, 
implies no disparagement to any other 

[177] 



DIVORCE 

State. The popularity of divorce is in- 
creasing in the United States, and pre- 
sumably the ratio of increase in Massa- 
chusetts indicates closely enough what 
the average ratio of increase is, or is 
going to be, in the rest of the country. 

What is to be inferred from these Mas- 
sachusetts figures ^ Is it that marriage is 
losing its hold upon the Americans ? Will 
one marriage in seven end in divorce in 
1934, and one marriage in three in I960.? 
The figures do not warrant such deduc- 
tions. It is fair to infer, not that more 
marriages fail than used to fail, but merely 
that a larger proportion of the failures 
go for treatment to the divorce courts. 
And whether that is an evil, and if so 
how much of an evil, is an interesting sub- 
ject for speculation. 

There are two standards about mar- 
riage and divorce, the Christian and the 
secular. The Christian standard, based 
on Christ's words as twice recorded in 

[178] 



DIVORCE 

the New Testament, makes adultery the 
only legitimate basis for divorce, and de- 
nies remarriage to the guilty party. That 
standard accords perfectly with the Chris- 
tian theory of marriage, by which twain 
become one flesh, and the joined of God 
are to be inseparable by man. That 
theory of marriage has not been beaten 
and is not likely to be. But Christ, when 
He expounded it, made mention of another 
theory and practice of marriage and 
divorce in use in the society in which He 
lived. "Moses for the hardness of your 
hearts," He said, * suffered you to put 
away your wives, but from the beginning 
it hath not been so." And when the dis- 
ciples demurred at the strictness of His 
rule and questioned the expediency of 
getting married at all if marriage was to 
be so confining, He seemed to admit that 
their deprecation was not altogether un- 
natural, and explained, "All men cannot 
receive this saying, but they to whom it 

[179] 



DIVORCE 

is given. He that is able to receive it, 
let him receive it." 

So that is where we are left. Nearly all 
of us who are capable of taking thought 
accept the Christian ideal of marriage as 
the true one, and if we get married at all 
it is with a sincere and definite purpose 
of continuing so bound for better or worse 
" until death us do part." All the divorce 
laws in Christian countries are based on 
the Christian ideal of marriage and recog- 
nize its general intention. It is not pos- 
sible to make a contract of marriage for 
a stipulated term, or during good be- 
haviour. The contract is for life. But 
because our notions of justice make us 
feel that a contract which one party 
deliberately abuses ought not to hold the 
other party to it, the laws empower the 
courts to grant divorces for causes that 
to the lawgivers of various States seem 
reasonable and sufiicient. Everybody 
knows how great a disparity there is in the 

[180] 



DIVORCE 

views of our State lawgivers as to what 
constitutes due ground for divorce. Some 
States in their statutes maintain the Chris- 
tian position and make adultery the only 
ground, forbidding the guilty party to 
marry again. Others grant release for 
cruelty, drunkenness, non-support, incom- 
patibility of disposition, and other rea- 
sons, and leave both the guilty and the in- 
nocent parties to use their own discretion 
about remarrying. The result of this 
diversity of secular laws is that married 
Americans who are tired of their bargain 
and have time enough and money enough 
to devote to getting quit of it can usually 
do so without much trouble, provided their 
spouses do not object. But it is still very 
hard for an American man to get rid of a 
wife who has not seriously misbehaved 
unless she is willing to be rid of him. 

The variety in divorce laws that has 
come in this country from the liberty the 
States have used in statute-making is usu- 

[1811 



DIVORCE 

ally set down as a great evil. I suppose it 
is. Certainly, it has many evil results. 
A perfect divorce law for all the country 
would be better. But would an imper- 
fect law for all the States be any better, 
and is there any reasonable possibility of 
any State or aggregation of States getting 
a law that is better than imperfect ? Any 
conceivable divorce law will make some 
hard cases, and the lack of a divorce law 
will make still worse ones. Some persons 
will suffer in any case. I am not so sure 
as some, perhaps better informed, persons 
are that one imperfect divorce law for 
the whole country would be so very much 
better than some variety in imperfections. 
There are advantages about flexibility. 
A marriage is usually past ready cure 
when the partners to it begin to read the 
statutes and compare Rhode Island with 
South Dakota. 

Who has vested interests in a marriage 
that are entitled to be respected when 
[182] 



DIVORCE 

there comes the question of a divorce? 
First of all the children of that marriage, 
if there are any; then the two parties to 
the marriage contract; then society, in- 
cluding the relatives and friends of the 
spouses, the church whose representative 
married them, and the public at large, 
which has an interest in maintaining the 
permanency of marriage. The children 
have the best right to have their interests 
consulted, for they are innocent and in- 
voluntary participants in the profits and 
the losses of the marriage. The prefer- 
ence of either or both parents for divorce 
may justly be set aside if it is contrary to 
the interests of the children. A young 
girl, her reason upset by vain efforts to 
reconcile her parents who were getting a 
divorce, shot her father the other day and 
was herself barely saved by him from sui- 
cide. And the next day the papers told of 
a sixteen-year-old boy at boarding-school 
who, hearing that his parents had been 

[183] 



DIVORCE 

divorced in spite of his efforts to prevent 
it, turned on the gas in his bedroom and 
died. That girl and that boy had been 
swindled by their parents. Had the 
parents a moral, and should they have 
had a legal, right to a divorce as against 
the wishes and interests of those children ? 
The interest of children in a marriage is 
the vital interest. All other are senti- 
mental as compared with it. Should there 
not be an age of consent at which children 
shall be allowed to permit the divorce of 
their parents.^ Prior to that age their 
interests might be protected by the courts, 
and failing their permission when they are 
old enough the divorce might wait until 
they are at least twenty-one. Legal sepa- 
ration might as well be allowed even to 
parents where circumstances warrant it 
and under reasonable conditions, for that 
is not incurable and does not leave either 
parent free to marry again, but the first 
question as to the granting of a complete 

[184] 



DIVORCE 

divorce should be how it will affect the 
children of the marriage. When a di- 
vorce is warranted and promises to bene- 
fit them, grant it. When it seems likely 
to be prejudicial to their interests, with- 
hold it until it may come without harm to 
them. 

When there are no children, the divorce 
question is simplified, but how far it still 
is from being simple and how far Ameri- 
can public opinion still is from an agree- 
ment about it is illustrated by the great 
variety, above noticed, of the divorce laws 
in the different States. The many States 
are as yet of many minds as to what are 
proper grounds for divorce, and their sev- 
eral statutes will never be harmonized 
until there is such a crystallization of gen- 
eral sentiment as has not yet shown any 
sign of coming. We can agree that when 
one party has fulfilled the marriage con- 
tract and the other has broken it, it is for 
the faithful and innocent party to say 

[185] 



DIVORCE 

whether or not the contract shall be an- 
nulled. We can agree that all the rights 
and privileges of the innocent party ought 
to be protected. But how about the case 
where the marriage is childless and hope- 
lessly distasteful to both parties, and 
they both want to be quit of their bonds 
and can agree about the details of release ? 
Is it necessary as a matter of morals and 
public policy to hold them to their con- 
tract and make them live it out ? Having 
made a mess of one experiment must they 
be estopped from ever making another.^ 
It is chiefly on that issue that opinion 
divides. 

In considering divorce it makes a dif- 
ference whether you start with the idea 
of Christian marriage and consider all 
defections from it as so many evidences 
of demoralization, or whether you begin 
with a view of a large and varied assort- 
ment of male and female human creatures 
with the propensity to pair off, and ob- 

[1861 



DIVORCE 

serve their matings. From the first point 
of view the large number of American di- 
vorces will seem to betoken a lamentable 
lack of constancy and rectitude of pur- 
pose. From the second point of view the 
very large proportion of marriages that 
hold good will seem a splendid testimony 
to the continuity of human preferences 
and the influence of Christian civilization. 
No less lofty a conception of marriage 
than Christ's would serve for an ideal. 
The realization of that ideal is its own 
munificent reward; the failure to realize 
it is its own punishment. To Christ such 
failure seems to have appeared a sufficient 
punishment, if we may judge from His 
compassionate attitude toward the woman 
taken in adultery. Nobody ever de- 
veloped the graces of Christian character 
by compulsion of law, and laws cannot 
be expected to keep all marriages up to 
the Christian standards. All Christian 
influence, direct and indirect, may prop- 

[187] 



DIVORCE 

eriy be exerted to make marriages per- 
manent, but secular laws may hardly at- 
tempt with safety to constrain folks to the 
realization of Christian ideals. I cannot 
see that if our divorce laws were stricter 
it would necessarily improve the status of 
marriage. What sort of people are get- 
ting divorces as it is ? A small proportion 
of the applicants are people of character 
and probity who have made unfortunate 
marriages from which by any standard 
of estimation they are entitled to be re- 
leased. Another group is composed of 
people of advantageous social standing, 
but of undisciplined natures and light 
character, whose manner of life and pur- 
suit of pleasure demoralize their standards 
of behaviour. When married people of 
this sort get tired of one another they want 
divorce that will qualify them to marry 
some one else and will so far protect their 
reputations that they may still be received 
in the society that is most to their taste. 

[188] 



DIVORCE 

This sort of convenient divorce the 
churches justly disapprove, and the more 
reputable members of polite society re- 
gard with a sort of toleration which is 
pitiful, disgusted, or scornful, according 
to the charitableness of the observer. If 
light-minded people could go to court 
and get divorces at will and remarry with- 
out prejudice to their standing in society, 
it would argue a serious corruption in 
morals. But that cannot be done. The 
contrary is so decidedly true that even 
the divorced people whose characters and 
behaviour entitle them to respect, and 
whose misfortunes entitle them to sym- 
pathy, suffer much from the prejudice 
with which all divorce is regarded. 

But the great bulk of the divorces are 
obtained by people of no particular stand- 
ing and no advantageous bringing up, who 
find that they are badly married and want 
to try again. This class includes a vast 
number of women who are deserted by 

[189] 



DIVORCE 

their husbands and, being left without 
means of support, are the more disposed, 
if opportunity offers, to marry again for 
the sake of a decent maintenance. It is 
hard to beHeve that the interests of society 
are gravely menaced by statutes which en- 
able a decent woman without means of 
support to cut loose from a husband who 
has deserted her, and take up, if she can, 
with one who is worth sticking to. We 
may say that having made one failure of 
marriage she had better let that institu- 
tion alone, but certainly we need not add 
to her troubles by harsh consideration of 
her efforts to reshape her life. 

We shall never all be satisfied with any 
conclusion about divorce. Divorce is 
failure, and failure is never pleasing. 
Our ideal of marriage is right as it stands, 
and marriage that conforms with it is so 
immeasurably better than any sort of di- 
vorce that it would seem safe to trust it 
to maintain itself irrespective of restric- 

[190] 



DIVORCE 
tion or compulsory legislation. Society 
will not become corrupt because divorce 
is too easy, though divorce may become 
too common because of the corruption of 
public morals. Divorce is a symptom, 
far more than a cause, of corruption. 



[191] 



THE PROSPECTS OF "SOCIETY" 
IN AMERICA 

An article contributed some months 
ago to Harper s Weekly by Mr. David 
Gray was embellished with a number of 
interesting thoughts and seems adapted 
to inspire some further reflections which 
may be worth consideration. Mr. Gray 
discoursed upon "Some Phases of Ameri- 
can Social Life," remarking upon the 
development of polite society in the vari- 
ous parts of our extensive country, and 
especially contrasting certain existing con- 
ditions in the great seaboard cities with 
those that prevail in the newer inland 
cities which are making such rapid and 
important progress in wealth and popula- 
tion. In the eastern seaboard cities — Bos- 
ton, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore 

[ 192 ] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

and Washington — he noticed a certain 
amount of inter-relationship, "a certain 
social organism" he called it, meaning, 
I take it, that the folks who concerned 
themselves with polite activities in any 
one of these cities had acquaintance and 
social relations with people of like inter- 
ests and standing in most of the others. 
But he was impressed with the social 
isolation of the inland cities, in each of 
which exists a pretty definite group of 
what, with apologies, I will call "society 
people" who live in intimate and edifying 
relations with one another, but seem, as 
a group, to be sufficient for themselves, 
and to have only a very slight connection, 
if any, with corresponding groups in other 
towns. He speculated about this state 
of things, whether it would continue or 
whether, eventually, society in America 
would achieve in some measure a national 
organization, centring, perhaps, in Wash- 
ington, as British society centres in Lon- 

[193] 



THE PROSPECTS OF 

don. Incidentally, he considered the 
kinds of gentlemen and ladies who were 
growing up in various parts of the coun- 
try, and without discovering any vital 
difference between those exhibited by 
the old seaboard cities and those who 
practise politeness in the inland towns, 
he betrayed a rather strong impression 
that the conditions of life in the inland 
towns was more favourable to the develop- 
ment of graces of mind, character, and de- 
portment, that the profuse expenditures 
of the older cities in social pleasures had 
its drawbacks and embarrassments, and 
that in the rapidly growing communities 
removed from the Atlantic seaboard, the 
best ideals of American breeding and 
manners in large measure are being fos- 
tered. 

I hope they are. I hope that Buffalo, 
Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, 
Cincinnati, Pittsburg and St. Louis, and 
half a hundred lesser but very potent and 

[194] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

ambitious towns, are turning out very 
high-class gentlefolks indeed. If their pro- 
duct surpasses the fine fruit of Boston's 
culture, and the carefully regulated and 
restricted output of Philadelphia, and the 
fine flavour that generations of canvas- 
back ducks and terrapin have left in Bal- 
tirriore, then is our broad land indeed a 
land of social promise. There is no 
doubt at all that there is plenty of good 
company in these States and that it is 
pretty well distributed. The inland cities 
are comparatively new, but not in the 
sense that they have lately emerged from 
barbarism. The people in them are not 
new. Those of American stock are just 
as old as the people of the Eastern cities 
from which their forebears came. Some 
of them have not been rich so long as 
some of the people in the Eastern cities, 
but some of the seaboard folks who are 
most active and most useful in society 
have not been rich so very long either. 

ri95i 



THE PROSPECTS OF 

But good company does not exactly con- 
stitute ''society," though a society that is 
not constituted of people who are good 
company is of no use. To make society 
you have to take the right quality of com- 
panionable folk and let them play to- 
gether for a good while, and adjust them- 
selves to one another, and form habits, 
and acquire congenial prejudices and lay 
down rules. All that is what is meant by 
organization. A "society" is not or- 
ganized by the election of a Board of 
Directors. It has no elections and no 
directors, but it has caucuses and con- 
sensuses of opinion and bosses, and to be 
perfectly organized it needs a supreme 
boss. All the world loves a boss even 
more than it loves a lover. There is more 
to do about a boss than about a lover. 
When you have done your lover the best 
turn you can and wished him good luck, 
that is almost the end of it. But a boss 
is no end of fun, especially a society boss. 

[196] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

To placate her, to win her approval, to 
get from her what she has to bestow, to 
machinate against her rule, to run in 
interlopers under her circus tent, to defy 
her at a pinch, all these are excellent di- 
versions for persons who are so lucky as 
to be included in a society which is organ- 
ized to the boss point, and who take pains 
to enjoy it and improve its opportunities. 

In England where society is organized 
on a national basis, the King is boss, and 
his authority is recognized. That helps 
to make it interesting. You see the chief 
oflBce of a society boss is to be an obstacle 
to happiness, for happiness can never be 
complete or satisfying or lasting if it has 
not due obstacles. But a society boss 
must be a purveyor of happiness too — a 
good provider for those who are favoured, 
and able to shine with rays that are appre- 
ciated when they come, and regretted 
when they are shut off. 

Who would be boss of a national 

[197] 



THE PROSPECTS OF 

American society centring in Washing- 
ton is a question that nearly concerns the 
possibiUty of the existence of such a so- 
ciety. Not the President, I think. The 
President comes and goes. He has not 
enough continuity of official position for 
the work, and he has too many other 
things to attend to. Presidents vary too, 
in taste, inclination and capacity. Presi- 
dent Roosevelt has a taste for society. 
Quadruple his salary and give him a life 
lease of the White House, and I dare say 
Washington would advance rapidly and 
noticeably toward becoming America's 
social centre. But so long as the attri- 
butes of the President are what they are, 
Washington can count on only a limited 
amount of help from the White House in 
realizing its social possibilities. 

I remember some years ago walking 
out Connecticut Avenue by moonlight 
after a long absence from the capital, and 
coming to a huge and imposing white 

[198] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

house that was like nothing that I remem- 
bered in the Washington I used to know. 
I stood and stared at it, saying to myself, 
"This means something new. The coun- 
try — ^the great West, I suppose — has be- 
gun to come here to live." So it had. 
That house and the people who lived in 
it took a hand that was felt in shaping 
Washington society. But what came of 
it ? The daughters of the house have all 
married Englishmen — one an English- 
man of great distinction — and I suppose 
that in the end they will all be bright 
stars shining in the firmament of Lon- 
don. They will perhaps promote the 
solidarity of the great society of the world 
by strengthening America's representa- 
tion in London, but they will not be of 
much use in helping to make Washington 
an American social centre. 

What should the ladies of that house 
have done if they had cared to devote 
themselves to perfecting the organization 

[199] 



THE PROSPECTS OF 

of American society ? Married rich raen 
from Chicago, Boston, and New York and 
taken them to Washington in the winter, 
to Uve in great houses and help make our 
national capital brilliant and distin- 
guished. But that is what they did not 
do, and what American girls with large 
fortunes and aspirations are not doing. 
They either marry in the town they live 
in, or marry and go to New York, or 
marry foreigners and live abroad. Those 
of whom we hear the most do the last. 

In considering the future of American 
society, it is natural to inquire into the 
tendencies of people who are so far ab- 
solved from questions of ways and means 
that they can do what they like and live 
where they will. People who still have 
to work for their living will stay where 
their work is, or go where work invites, 
and society for them will be no more 
than an employment of spare hours. Let 
us see then what our very rich people 

[200] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

seem to be doing and whither they are 
moving. 

The rich people of the seaboard cities, 
as a rule, stay where they are. Boston 
and Philadelphia hold their own. Balti- 
more does so not quite so successfully, 
but sufficiently. Washington attracts 
some people of large fortune and a good 
many who have modest independent in- 
comes. New York keeps most of its own 
rich people and gathers in throngs of others 
from all parts of the country. But that is 
not because of its social attractions, but be- 
cause it is the commercial center of the 
country, and every man whose accumula- 
tion of dollars is big enough to be interest- 
ing has business there, finds entertainment 
there and feels at home there. New 
York, far more than Washington, is the 
national social centre of the very rich. 

Now as to the class, still small, but 
doubtless growing, of the rich who do 
not work. What happens to such per- 

r 201 1 



THE PROSPECTS OF 

sons in the inland cities where they al- 
ready abound considerably, and what will 
happen to their descendants ? They live 
and enjoy life in societies, which, as Mr. 
Gray says, are intimate, agreeable and 
very restricted. When in the course of 
time they get tired of seeing the same 
people at dinner and observing the opera- 
tion of the same minds, they pull out and 
go to Europe. When they get tired of 
Europe they come home. Every year 
they go two and three times to New York 
to buy various commodities and see some 
plays. In the summer many of them 
come to the seashore where they live 
agreeably and make new acquaintances. 
All the way from Newport to Bar Har- 
bor, you see their villas, owned or hired, 
dotting the coast. If society really inter- 
ests them as a pursuit, very likely they 
go to Newport, but comparatively few of 
them are interested in society as a pur- 
suit. They want no more than a pleasant 

[202] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

life, with an anchor somewhere, and rea- 
sonable entertainment. Their boys and 
girls go away to the big schools and col- 
leges, and get to know boys and girls 
from the seaboard cities and all the rest 
of the country. When it comes to marry- 
ing off their children, our inland friends 
are apt to regret the isolation of their 
home society, and to wish that they could 
offer their children a greater choice of 
possible partners than the local field 
affords. Then, no doubt, they feel the 
want of a town that can do for them what 
London does for England. Do they 
take a house in Washington and bring 
their children out there ? Why should 
they.^ There are few men in Washing- 
ton for likely girls to marry, and very 
little work there for likely youths to do. 
They are more likely to take a house or 
an apartment in New York, where, 
though the organized society seems to be 
somewhat restricted, "everybody that is 

[ 203 ] 



THE PROSPECTS OF 

anybody" has friends, and most people 
have relatives. 

And yet comparatively few people from 
the inland cities go to New York for social 
purposes alone. The season in New 
York is short, and society, I take it — I 
speak from hearsay — is still much less in- 
teresting than in London. We all have 
noticed cases of Americans, who having 
the inclination, the money, and the 
energy to make society their chief busi- 
ness, and having realized all the social 
hopes that New York had to offer, have 
finally packed up and moved to London 
where there was more to attain. New 
York is a very handy town to own a 
house, or maintain an apartment, in. 
Any one who has such a house with some 
clothes hanging in the closet, and some- 
thing for breakfast in the cupboard, will 
be pretty sure to use it a good many days 
every year, no matter what houses he has 
elsewhere. And having such a house he 

[204] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

will have valuable opportunities of hu- 
man converse with available folks from 
all parts of the United States that have as 
yet been explored, including profitable 
ones who live in New York itself. But as 
to whether Destiny is figuring on making 
New York or any other city the centre of 
organized society in the United States I 
know not, and do not find the means to 
make an intelligent guess. Perhaps Mr. 
Henry James, whose experienced eyes are 
gathering new impressions of his native 
land, may speculate about it in a fashion 
that will add to knowledge. Without 
hope or pretence of adding to knowledge, 
I guess that our country is too big, and its 
distances too magnificent and its people 
too busy, ever to develop a single definite 
social capital. It seems to me more 
likely to continue to have many social 
centres, each important and useful in its 
own territory, their isolation to be amel- 
iorated by the travel habit, the constant 

[205] 



"SOCIETY" IN AMERICA 

migrations of solvent people in summer to 
the sea, in winter to the South, at odd 
times to New York and Washington, and 
periodically to Europe. One great func- 
tion of a social capital is to bring people 
together. In this country that end is 
likely to be well served by other means. 

1905. 



[206] 



SUMMER 

I READ it last week in the paper that, 
whereas a generation or two ago solvent 
Americans used to have "country places," 
now they have '* farms." In the change 
of nomenclature the writer found an indi- 
cation of a society that in the midst of 
wealth is seeking simplicity. 

Yes, we are getting back to nature. 
Nature is a good thing, and more gener- 
ally appreciated than it was, and there 
are many Americans nowadays who can 
afford to cultivate it. And the favourite 
contemporary way of getting back to it is 
by automobile. You must not laugh. It 
is true. Witness Rudyard Kipling, who 
has got back to more deeply rural British 
nature since motor cars came than his 
pet torpedo-boats would have shown him 
in a thousand years. 

[207] 



SUMMER 

And the favourite time for getting back 
to nature is summer. There is a delu- 
sion prevalent among city people that 
summer is the season of leisure. The 
very strength and wide diffusion of that 
idea bears interesting evidence of the big 
place the cities and their denizens have 
made for themselves in our day. To be 
sure, the yachts go into commission in 
summer ; it is vacation time in the schools 
(except in the summer schools), and for 
some of the lawyers, judges, doctors, and 
preachers. A vast number of American 
women and children and some men go to 
Europe, and in the course of the season 
more of the men follow them. The peo- 
ple in the cities whose vocations do not 
compel them to stay there, and who can 
afford to get out, do get out for longer 
or shorter intervals and hie them to the 
seashore, the mountains, the lakes, or 
the plain country. Organized efforts are 
made to get as many as possible of the 

[208] 



SUMMER 

city children out of town, and many (but 
not enough) fresh-air funds are gathered 
to that beneficent end. Beyond doubt, 
there is a decided suggestion of spare 
time and mental enlargement about sum- 
mer, but, after all, it is in the summer 
half of the year that most of the work is 
done. All the crops are raised in sum- 
mer; most of the building is done; most 
of the factories run; the railroads are 
busy; all the villages that take in sum- 
mer boarders work overtime in August. 
Things hum all summer long. Even the 
cities which the society pages of the news- 
papers speak of as "deserted" retain 
four-fifths of their people, and keep most 
of them very busy indeed. A very large 
majority of the wage-earners of the world 
work hard all summer long. But there 
is to be said, that at least one-third of all 
the living people are below the wage- 
earning age, and another third are sup- 
plementary or indirect wage-earners, not 

[209] 



SUMMER 

immediate ones, and are not tied to oflBce 
hours or factory hours. And, besides, the 
summer days are long, and the habit of 
shutting down on Saturday afternoon, 
which is getting so strong a hold on the 
cities, has some hold on the villages too. 
Anyhow, for one reason or another, good 
or bad, the ideal of summer is that it is 
the do-nothing season, when wise people 
rest all they can, and no one works any 
harder than he must. 

I take it that our deepest impressions 
are those formed in youth, and that this 
one of summer as leisure time is one of 
them. It makes a great deal of diflFer- 
ence in our world whether school keeps 
or not. By all odds, our biggest and 
most important American leisure class is 
made up of persons in the educational 
stage of life who are temporarily released 
from the institutions they attend. The 
first claim on summer belongs to lovers. 
The next to college persons and school- 

[2101 



SUMMER 

girls and school-boys, most of whom will 
be lovers presently, and who find summer 
a convenient time in which to get ac- 
quainted. The rest of summer belongs 
to the grown-ups, who are entitled to col- 
lect such dues as they are able, but the 
chief summer use of the grown-ups seems 
to be in making the season profitable to 
the young. To make existence profit- 
able for the young is about all there is in 
life for grown-ups anyway. It seems to 
be the chief thing they are here for. That 
may sound like servitude, and in some 
cases, no doubt, it is galling, but nothing 
ails servitude as a manner of spending 
one's life provided it is the right kind. 
This servitude to the rising generation 
suits most of the adults. I notice that 
those of them who work hardest and 
most sucessfully at it seem to be having 
the most fun, and that those who lack 
young people to plan for and slave for 
take such pleasures as they can find 

[2111 



SUMMER 

somewhat heavily. In this matter of 
getting back to nature in the summer, ob- 
serve that the young are much better 
at it than the adults who have been 
trained long and painfully to ''useful- 
ness." Mr. Maxfield Parrish has made 
a picture called summer; a picture full of 
shimmering atmosphere. Its central fig- 
ure is the true summer hero. Atmos- 
phere is all he has on and he has pan- 
pipes in his hand. This summer hero 
who has got back to nature with so much 
certainty, is young, you will notice, and 
not a bit useful. He never did a chore, 
never will; never folded up his clothes, 
never opened a book, never was end rush 
nor caught behind the bat. No business 
man would employ him. He is the ideal 
summer person. Any grown-up who is 
going to compete with him must do it by 
proxy. 

There is where the rising generation 
comes in. A contemporary boy in his 

[212] 



SUMMER 

school vacation has to wear some clothes, 
and in other details shows the effects of 
civilization. He can never attain to quite 
the degree of rational emancipation of 
Mr. Parrish's boy, but he can come near 
enough to it to surprise you — ^yes, and 
gratify you very much. He can be so 
useless so long, not only without crab- 
bedness or complaint, but with continu- 
ous good humour and enjoyment. His 
clothes are very slight hindrance to com- 
plete joy, for when it is hot he wears very 
few. Trowsers — apt to be duck; a shirt 
with the sleeves rolled up, open in the 
neck and the collar-band turned in ; shoes, 
abbreviated stockings, and something to 
hold them up, and nothing else worth 
mentioning — except, oh, yes, at times, a 
hat-band. 

I had almost forgotten the coloured 
hat-bands, and they are one of the con- 
temporary summer time's most signifi- 
cant adornments. Thirty years ago, I 

[213] 



SUMMER 

remember, the college oarsmen and base- 
ball players used to wear them. Very 
gradually it penetrated the busy mind of 
man that a wider use of them was desir- 
able, and now they brilliantly supplement 
and differentiate the mission of the straw 
hat. The straw hat only proclaims the 
season. The hat-band goes into human 
details. It says, according to its uses and 
their arrangement, "I am of St. Nicode- 
mus's School," "I am of such a group in 
Newbridge College," "I am of the Ex- 
teenth Regiment," and so on, and so on, 
until the observer who is wise in hat-bands, 
as he walks abroad in a great town or 
wherever the summer youth congregate, 
is constantly receiving visual information 
about his younger fellows whom he meets. 
There is a large assortment of hat-bands 
that mean something in particular, and 
a vast number besides that don't, but 
they all have a joyous influence, and 
they all greet the summer when it 

[214] 



SUMMER 

comes and mark its progress by their 
fading. 

I like the hat-bands. If they tell a little 
story and help one to identify his fellows, 
so much the better. We don't know 
enough about one another, and miss many 
pleasant exchanges by mere lack of timely 
information. If all people were tagged 
with cards of brief description it would be 
a high convenience to many others be- 
sides the police. 

Hat-bands and coloured shirts are a 
sign of an awakened propensity in males 
to share in that adornment of the summer 
which has so long been prosecuted with 
recognized success by women. No single 
feature of summer is appreciated with so 
much enthusiasm as the girls' clothes. 
It is understood that good winter clothes 
involve rather serious expenditure, but the 
number of girls and women who manage 
to look charming in summer dresses is so 
much greater than could be the number 

[215 1 



SUMMER 

"who are rich, that the conclusion is forced 
that summer raiment may be inexpensive 
and still pretty. 

As I was saying, the only way that 
trained and civilized grown-up people 
may hope to get back to nature, and that 
perfect effortless receptiveness that is 
ideally suitable to the summer season, is 
by using the still imperfectly perverted 
young as their proxies. And the young 
lend themselves very liberally to that use, 
and cooperate in their elders' efforts, let- 
ting the elders work, and demonstrating 
by enjoyment that their labour is not in 
vain. 

One thing that summer-worshipping 
elders who have the necessary apparatus 
do is to get up house-parties for their 
young. Nothing brings the summer sea- 
son home to elders with greater penetra- 
tion and makes them feel nearer to nature 
than house-parties. To make one is sim- 
ple. You take some houses (furnished), 

[216] 



SUMMER 

a little land, some water if procurable, 
food, drink, a few horses, motor-cars, and 
sailboats, according to taste or income, 
add from six to a dozen young persons of 
assorted genders, stir with a thermometer, 
and go and sit in a cool place. The 
house-party does all the rest; plays ten- 
nis or golf, drives, motes, goes swimming, 
has picnics, sleeps, is regular at meals 
and animated in discourse. At least, it 
should be animated in discourse. If it 
isn't, you've made a mistake somewhere. 
But almost always it is, and in return for 
your work in keeping the machinery run- 
ning, you have wonderful opportunities 
for improving and rejuvenating observa- 
tion. You hear also some of the newest 
terms of speech and some of the new 
songs. And you get back to nature in 
one of its most edifying phases, for have 
we not the testimony of ancient philoso- 
phers that there is nothing in nature 
more interesting than the way of a man 

[217] 



SUMMER 

with a maid unless it is the way of a maid 
with a man? 

As for the grown people who try to get 
the flavour of summer, not by proxy, but 
at first hand, they do various things. A 
lot of them go to Europe. What they do 
there I do not know, nor has it ever been 
satisfactorily expounded to me. It has 
ceased to be good form for Americans to 
dwell on the details of their experiences 
in Europe. When I was there it was fall 
and not much doing. Yet it was pleasant. 
I dare say it is pleasant in summer, else 
folks would not straggle over there in 
such droves as they do, making Ameri- 
can house-parties at all the hotels. 

Some grown-up people live on yachts 
in summer. The sea is a part of nature 
and undoubtedly worth getting back to, 
though there is force in Conrad's criti- 
cism of yachting as being only an amuse- 
ment of life, whereas the merchant ser- 
vice, he says, is life itself. The strong 

[218] 



SUMMER 

bond of the sea, the fellowship of the 
craft, does not exist, he says, between 
yachtsmen as it does between men who 
seriously follow the sea for a living. 

Still, yachting is delightful when the 
market has gone your way, and if you 
can get back to nature in a motor-car 
you can in a yacht. 

Yachts, though, are not for the many. 
You get a great deal more of nature for 
your money in a garden. It needn't be 
a great garden either, but it had better 
be the same one every summer. You 
make gardens grow by sticking to them, 
and poking things into the ground in suc- 
cessive years. Next to a child or a young 
person a garden is the most helpful sum- 
mer property, and folks of thrift in ordi- 
nary circumstances ought to have both. 

Many people see more in gardens that 
is worth seeing than most people see on 
yachts. I have known cases where gar- 
dens ministered more effectually to some 

[ 219 ] 



SUMMER 

people's civilization than Europe did to 
others. The things about civilization 
that people can spend a summer in Europe 
without finding out would fill books. 

About a century ago there was a year 
hereabouts that was known as the year 
without a summer. In that year snow 
fell in every month. The people didn't 
like it. 

Summer is popular ; deservedly, I think, 
though reviled at times when it is too 
hot. 

Jvly, 1905. 



[220] 



CONVICTIONS 

Is there any new way of having fun ? 
Every once in a while somebody says: 
"Oh, if there were only a new kind of 
meat! I am tired of all the meats; I'd 
like something new to eat!" Then all 
the rest of us overfed people say, "Yes, 
that would be pleasant." We would all 
like to put something in our mouths that 
not only tasted good, but tasted different. 
Well, that is only a detail of our chronic 
longing for new forms of entertainment. 
Those of us who still try to keep amused 
vary as much as we can the forms of 
amusement that we patronize. We 
change our toys and shift the occupation 
of our leisure. One year golf makes life 
seem worth living for us; presently 
"bridge" is our standard solace. Not 
very long ago bicycles made all mankind 

[221] 



CONVICTIONS 

happy. More lately automobiles swell 
the tide of joy for the well-to-do and their 
servants. Last summer there was some 
select enthusiasm about motor-boats, and 
presently it will be something else. All 
this is mere shifting of toys, and particu- 
larly of the newest toys. The old ones — 
an enormous number of them, ranging 
from dolls and marbles up to horses, 
yachts, gardens, and country-places — 
hold their own with the multitude, and 
though this or that one is more in request 
to-day and somewhat less to-morrow, 
they never, as a class, fall into disuse. 
But playing with toys, whatever they are, 
constitutes only one kind of fun, and 
though you change the toy you don't 
acquire by such a shift any new general 
method. In the large sense, to find a 
new way to have fun amounts to very 
much more than merely taking up with a 
new toy. 

What put it all into my mind was a talk 

[2221 



CONVICTIONS 

I had with young Pelham who is now put- 
ting some finishing touches to his educa- 
tion, and expects in a year or two to begin 
the practice of a profession in New York. 
Pelham is a youth of excellent energy. He 
plays hard and with considerable success 
and distinction, and I believe he works 
hard when he works. We played golf to- 
gether. Golf is not one of the exercises 
to which he has applied himself, and after 
we had done nine holes pretty discredit- 
ably, we had both had enough, and sat 
down on a bench to talk. We talked 
about New York, a town the resources of 
which Pelham has not yet explored. Be- 
ing a healthy young fellow he was dis- 
posed to consider what sport the place 
might be constrained to afford. He hopes 
to be able, under Providence, to experi- 
ment with some of the more expensive 
forms of amusement and we discussed the 
clubs and the hunting in the neighbour- 
hood, and the various means by which to 

[ 223 ] 



CONVICTIONS 

escape the dulness which proverbially 
results from too close application to work. 

I confess that I was somewhat daunted 
by the exertions that he faced with so 
much confidence. To play as he hoped 
to play would be a first-rate occupation 
for a man not otherwise employed, but 
to anticipate so much hard pleasuring in 
time snatched from importunate profes- 
sional labours seemed to me a Herculean 
sort of hope. But, of course, that is the 
way with the young. They have strength 
to spend for enjoyment, and do not grudge 
the expenditure. 

"You know, Pelham," said I, "the 
strong point of New York is that it is a 
good place to work in, and the great and 
controlling amusement there is making 
money. If you can learn to enjoy work 
you'll have a happy time, for there is 
plenty of it, and the wages are good for 
those who can command them. And 
there are dinners to eat, and people to 

[224] 



CONVICTIONS 

talk to, and a great variety of profitable 
girls to pursue, or to avoid, according to 
one's discretion, but wholesome outdoor 
sport comes rather hard ; though it can be 
had." 

I was ashamed to go on and confess 
how much it fatigued my imagination to 
think of the active pleasures he held in 
such joyous prospect. I let him go with- 
out expunging any impression he might 
have formed that I was in active sym- 
pathy with his hearty young hopes of 
sport. But when I met his mother again 
I proposed to her that she should retain 
me as a seasoned and disillusionized 
philosopher to represent to her son, as 
opportunity offered, what an exhausting 
quest the chase after pleasure was, and 
how doubtful was the adequacy of its 
remuneration. "In so far," said I, "as 
I can convince him that work is the best 
fun and yields the most solid satisfactions, 
I shall be saving your money, and put- 

[225] 



CONVICTIONS 

ting him ahead in the great work of self- 
support. And, of course, I should be 
teaching true doctrine, for work is the 
main thing, and the most remunerative." 

"Yes," she said, "it is true: but why 
force so much ripe knowledge on him.? 
Let it come to him in due time. It will 
come plenty soon enough!" 

It is told of Samuel Tilden that in con- 
sequence of a severe illness when he was 
an infant, he grew up a very delicate 
boy, entirely inapt at out-of-door sports, 
and being practically cut off from the 
society and pleasures of lads of his own 
age, he found his fun chiefly indoors, in 
books and conversation with his elders. 
It happened that his father was a politi- 
cian, and Samuel absorbed politics with 
all his eyes and ears, as well as through 
his pores. He listened to the discussions 
of such frequenters of his father' house 
as Van Buren, Governor Marcy and 
Senator Silas Wright, and he read Jeffer- 

[226] 



CONVICTIONS 

son's writings until he knew them almost 
by heart. "It thus happened," says his 
biographer, ''that he practically had no 
youth; he scarcely ever knew intimately 
any young people, nor did he ever possess 
any of that facility in the use of his 
limbs and muscles w^hich boys usually 
acquire in their hours of recreation/' 
All that was his misfortune, and he 
suffered a good many ill consequences 
from it. Nevertheless, it is evident that 
there were compensations and that his 
youth, though unusual, was not unhappy. 
His relations with his father were very 
intimate; he liked grown-up talk and 
liked to think about grown-up subjects. 
Long before he was twenty he had a 
pretty complete set of political convic- 
tions, and knew what they were and why 
he had them. And he learned to think 
pretty nearly to the bottom of a subject 
which he considered. Now, all that was 
fun; his kind of fun; the only kind, 

[ 227 ] 



CONVICTIONS 

apparently, that was open to him; and 
he enjoyed it. Constrained by physical 
disabilities, he got his pleasure out of the 
only part of him that he found unim- 
paired — ^his intellect. But it happened 
that that was first-rate, and strengthened 
under cultivation. The result was, that 
though his bad health bothered him a 
great deal he got ample satisfactions out 
of life as he went along, was a companion 
of leaders in his youth, won extraordi- 
nary success in his profession, and return- 
ing in later life to active political leader- 
ship fought out and won great conflicts 
for honesty, to the vast benefit of his city 
and his State. 

We need not expect any lad to set him- 
self to have the sort of fun that Tilden 
had as a boy except under some sort of 
compulsion. A healthy boy is bound to 
have, and ought, of course, to have, a 
different development with a great deal 
more open-air exercise in it. But if any 

[228] 



CONVICTIONS 

of us is blessed with a reasonably good 
mind, he must not make the mistake of 
trying to get too large a proportion of the 
fun that is reasonably due to him out of 
his arms and legs and stomach. The 
bulk of it he must get out of his mind. 
Pleasure is not very valuable in itself. 
It isn't the same as happiness except in 
very early youth. Economically it is of 
little value except for purposes of repair. 
Only so much of it is really worth while 
as constitutes recreation, as restores fresh- 
ness to the mind, hitches new kites to the 
imagination and revives the energies. A 
good deal can be used to advantage in 
that way, but it is only an accessory to 
real living. A life in which pleasure is 
the chief purpose is not only inglorious, 
but it usually fails to realize its own 
moderate aim. The quest for amuse- 
ment when too intense destroys the 
power, as well as the inclination, to win 
anything more profitable, and is notfiU- 

[229] 



CONVICTIONS 

ing in itself. Most of the fun we have 
we get in the rebound from effort. We 
have to work for the appetite which 
makes our pleasures taste good. To rest 
is delightful if we are tired, but if we have 
not acquired a preliminary fatigue, it 
merely bores us. To talk is delightful if 
we have anything in our minds worth 
imparting or discussing, and some one 
worth discussing it with, but talk is of 
little account unless it proceeds out of a 
mind which has been duly trained and 
replenished. Tilden, debarred from or- 
dinary sport, had fun because he had 
knowledge, mental power, and convic- 
tions. He was apparently very strong in 
convictions, both moral and political. 
He wanted to see them prevail, and was 
willing on occasion to work enormously 
to make them prevail. 

Nobody who is endowed with a good 
mind and wants to live to his satisfaction 
can afford to neglect the acquirement of 

[230] 



CONVICTIONS 

convictions. What are they ? They 
ought to be opinions based on knowledge 
and definitely thought out. Practically 
they come in various ways — often by in- 
heritance, or as the result of early training ; 
sometimes by association, sometimes from 
the automatic working of the mind dur- 
ing long periods when it is acquiring and 
sifting knowledge and experience. Some- 
times again convictions seem to come sud- 
denly, especially religious convictions, 
though there is usually a long process of 
preparatory thought behind them, and it 
is really only the final conclusion that is 
sudden. Deep convictions on any sub- 
ject don't come ready-made. One has to 
work for them: to earn them. If they 
are to hold and to influence conduct, 
they must be planted deep. But they 
are worth all the trouble it takes to ac- 
quire them because of the increased inter- 
est they impart to life. That that is the 
common opinion about them appears 

[231] 



CONVICTIONS 

from the tenacity with which folks who 
have them hang on to them. They are 
absolute valuables, recognized as worth 
keeping even at a great sacrifice. A man 
who has convictions is more highly re- 
garded because of them, even by persons 
whose opinions differ from his. What- 
ever his convictions may be, and whether 
they are altogether sound or not, he is 
felt to be more of a man for having them. 
When we say of any man that he has no 
convictions, it is as much as to say that 
he is second-rate and can hardly amount 
to very much even though he has good 
abilities. 

Now in the holiday season, when we are 
all considering how we may benefit one 
another, and (though with less solicitude, 
I hope) what good things we are likely to 
acquire for ourselves, it seems worth sug- 
gesting that if we can contribute to enrich 
anybody's Christmas stocking with a new 
and valuable conviction, or can get one in 

r 232 1 



CONVICTIONS 

our own stocking, we shall have improved 
the Christmas opportunity to better pur- 
pose than is common. I shall not put it 
on the ground that convictions are neces- 
sary to salvation, though possibly they are. 
It may be said with plausibility that the 
test of any civilization is its ability to 
secure a due proportion of salvation to the 
population it affects, and that it is high or 
low according as that proportion is large 
or small. But civilization cannot really 
prosper except as it is based on convic- 
tions and sound ones. Nevertheless, I 
do not here urge the acquirement of con- 
victions for the sake of civilization or of 
salvation, but merely on the ground that 
the possession of them vastly increases 
one's pleasure in life. To be in earnest 
about some things, to believe in some 
ideals and give them service and devo- 
tion, is far better fun than to drift through 
life unconvinced, unattached, uncon- 
cerned except with self-interest, the rou- 

[ 233 ] 



CONVICTIONS 

tine labours of the day and the pleasures of 
the hour. To learn the truth, and labour 
to make it prevail is the thing that is 
really worth while. That is the general 
employment that is always satisfying, and 
which makes all particular employments 
and pleasures profitable and wholesome 
because they are contributory to it. It 
is the old story of seeking righteousness 
first, and having all the other things 
thrown in. A man may have a thousand 
defects and be good for something; he 
may have a thousand abilities and be of 
no real use. He is no good unless he has 
character, and he cannot have character 
unless he has some sound convictions. 

Are all these sober reiterations of con- 
ceded truths too much like a stick for the 
Chiistmas stockings.^ Peccavi; I apolo- 
gize. Perhaps it is because we have just 
come out of a political campaign which 
involved searching of many hearts in the 
effort to discover what political convic- 

[234] 



CONVICTIONS 

tions they clung to. In the multitude of 
thoughtful men who have asked them- 
selves where they stood on this or that 
public question and what they wanted, 
many have been puzzled to reply and 
have hesitated to decide with which great 
party they should act. They have doubt- 
less realized that the men who will deter- 
mine our country's course are men who 
do know what they want; who have con- 
victions and the courage of them. And 
on the soundness of the convictions of 
such men the country's immediate course 
depends 

And as for that likely young Pelham, 
so eager in exercises, facing life with such 
a lively ardour for wholesome sport, with 
what particular conviction shall I hope his 
Christmas stocking may bulge ? Not 
any precocious conclusion that all things 
are vanity or that all flesh is grass. No! 
No! Leave him his ardour and his ex- 
ercises too. They will both do him good if 

[ 235 ] 



CONVICTIONS 

they keep within bounds. Shall we have 
him convinced that protection is robbery; 
that trade should be free ; that the trusts 
ought, or ought not, to go ? Oh, no ; none 
of those particulars. I only ask for him 
this time a general conviction of his re- 
sponsibility as a human creature and a 
budding citizen; a realization that it is 
his business not only to get on in the 
world, but to contrive, in so far as lies in 
him, that the world may continue to be 
fit to live in, and to afford all honest ad- 
venturers fit chances and a fair course. 
I would have him gain the general convic- 
tion that we are all members one of an- 
other, and bound to make our individual 
development and prosperity harmonious 
with the general good. That is a very 
moderate conviction, a perfectly sound 
one, and one highly proper to the Christ- 
mas season. Folks may have it, and yet 
differ as to details, and seem to work at 
cross purposes. Yet if they work with 

[236] 



CONVICTIONS 

the sort of purpose that that conviction 
breeds, good is bound to come of it, for 
it is out of the conflict of opposing forces 
that most of the best things do come. 
The hope of the world Hes not in the ex- 
pectation that all the decent people will 
ever agree about anything, but rather in 
their working, each at his own job, ac- 
cording to his own lights, but with all his 
work tempered and directed by his inter- 
est in the common purpose. 

And it is better fun that way. Life 
goes better if you look upon it as a serious 
business, relieved by sport, than if you 
look upon it as an opportunity for sport 
marred by other engagements. 

January^ 1905. 



[237] 



SPECULATION 

It tells in a Sunday paper, of the date 
of this writing, how somebody made a 
million dollars in a day. The somebody 
himself tells the story. It was done in 
Wall Street when Union PaciJBc lately 
lifted itself by the boot straps. It was not 
really done in a day, but was the culmina- 
tion of weeks of anxious head work. The 
culmination came impetuously, and 
proved to be unexpectedly tall and ample. 
The somebody did, apparently, see him- 
self a million dollars or so richer at the 
end of a day than he was at the beginning, 
and very much richer at the end of the 
day following, and so on for several days 
thereafter. He did get his million, and 
much more apparently, at a swoop, and 
naturally he was happy over it. To give 

[238] 



SPECULATION 

some immediate relief to his feelings, he 
sent out and bought a vast white summer 
palace that the late president of a life in- 
surance company, flushed with salaries 
and gains that were subsequently con- 
demned, had built for himself on the Jer- 
sey shore. So shift the glories of this 
world, especially the stuccoed glories of 
the Jersey shore. 

Mr. Somebody is a decent man, for 
aught that appears to the contrary, and 
the millions that his Pacific plunges 
brought him seemed to be honest money, 
as money goes. But since to read of sud- 
den and prodigious stock-market successes 
tends to disturb the equanimity of all of 
us drudges, we are entitled to console 
ourselves by any reflections that we can 
entertain in deprecation of these large 
accessions of unearned wealth, and in dis- 
paragement of their value to those who 
grab them. How good is this money 
which Mr. Somebody scooped up two 

[239] 



SPECULATION 

months ago and which, very possibly, he 
has been able to retain as long as this ? It 
will certainly buy things. Did it not buy 
the stuccoed palace ? It is just as good 
as any money to buy things with. Jewel- 
lers will take it, and yacht builders and 
sellers of automobiles, and grocery men 
and marketmen, too, and churches and 
colleges. Ordinarily, there is no special 
taint on the Wall Street money that is 
won by outsiders who succeed in buying 
stocks that rise, or in selling stocks that 
drop. Most of us, if we attempt such 
speculations at all, accept the profits of 
them, when there are any profits, with a 
cheerful spirit, however in the back part 
of our minds we may deprecate the proc- 
esses from which our profits spring. 

And what is the matter with the proc- 
esses, and why, if we have preserved any 
ethical instincts, do we distrust them, even 
to the point, in some cases, of holding that 
the next worse thing to losing a large sum 

[240] 



SPECULATION 

of money in Wall Street is to win a large 
sum there ? If we had sufficient money 
in hand, and knew positively that by 
buying in the open market certain quan- 
tities of certain stocks we could win a 
large sum, would we refuse to do it ? Not 
many of us would, unless our positive 
knowledge came in such a way as to leave 
us without moral right to act upon it. 
The prejudice against getting something 
for nothing is not strong enough in many 
minds to compass such a renunciation. 
But in actual practice fiscal opportunity 
does not present itself as a certainty to be 
accepted or refused as one may choose. 
It offers as a risk, and as a rule it offers 
only to persons who are looking for 
chances. There are a great many people 
who never look for such chances. Their 
objection to them is, first, that they are 
too risky; and, second, that the pursuit 
of them is not conducive to the develop- 
ment of the quaUties of mind and of char- 

[241] 



SPECULATION 

acter which they value. Speculation is 
a mental and moral poison, just as alcohol 
and, to a less degree, tobacco are physical 
poisons. That is not a conclusive reason 
for letting it entirely alone, for very many 
of the poisons are useful to take. But it 
is a first-rate reason for using the utmost 
caution in dealing with it. There is a 
speculative element in almost every kind 
of business. Farming is partly specu- 
lative; so is manufacturing and banking 
and shopkeeping. Work that has not a 
gamble in it, is, by so much, the worse 
for the lack. We like a gamble better 
than a certainty, provided the hazard is 
not too great. The fisherman who makes 
a small haul one day and a big one an- 
other day, gets better entertainment out 
of his work than if he got precisely an 
average weight of fish whenever he went 
out. But there is a wide difference be- 
tween work that has a speculative ele- 
ment in it, and that species of speculation 

[242] 



SPECULATION 

which is the expression of a desire to 
step in and reap where another has sown. 
This last is not an elevating occupation. 
It is not illegal, but at least it is parasitic. 
And it is very greedy! Is it not true that 
a mind that is once committed to the 
aspiration to get something for nothing is 
debased, and is the more debased the 
more it succeeds in getting what it is 
after ? 

A clever and successful professional 
speculator lately argued that speculation 
in stocks, grain, and other products that 
men bet on, was in itself a work of vast 
usefulness because it was a necessary 
part of the process of establishing prices. 
Every person, he declared, who bet five 
dollars in a bucket shop contributed his 
mite of effort to this vastly important 
work. He made a good argument, and 
undoubtedly there was a basis of truth 
to it. There are other fields of useful- 
ness, however, in which the bucket shop's 

[243] 



SPECULATION 

patron and the other speculators can 
spend their money much more usefully, 
and after all, though speculators do help 
to make prices, they are very apt to make 
them wrong, thereby necessitating further 
outlay of labour and expense to make 
them over again. Nobody was ever 
known to console himself for money lost 
in speculation, by the thought that he 
had contributed usefully to the making 
of a price, though that plea may have its 
value to a winner, in extenuating his gains. 
They need extenuation, don't they? 
Somehow Mr. Somebody's millions won 
overnight by the advance of stocks bought 
on margins, are not quite as good money 
as they might be, in spite of their pur- 
chasing powers. Hard as it is to gener- 
alize about speculation — ^to say this sort 
is fair and that is not, this sort is res- 
pectable and that isn't, this sort is useful 
and that pernicious ^ — ^we do in our minds 
make distinctions, and most of us are 

[244] 



SPECULATION 

clearly conscious of having vastly more 
respect for money that has in some sense 
been earned, than for money that has 
merely been gambled for. We are apt to 
feel, too, that the debasement of spirit, 
which we suspect of being an incident of 
gambling gains, is proportionate to the 
size of the winnings, and that a man who 
scoops up a million or two at a time has 
taken more poison into his moral system 
than another whose successes have been 
moderate or trifling. These sentiments, 
being felt in the bones rather than in the 
mind, and being highly disputable, must 
be verified, if they are verified at all, by 
observation of contemporary mankind. 
What does this easy-come money do .^ 
Does it strengthen character or weaken it ? 
Does it establish families or destroy them ? 
Does it make for righteousness or for rot- 
tenness ? I have no answer to give to 
these questions. I merely wonder about 
them. There is bone and sinew in the 

[ U5 ] 



SPECULATION 

country now. Where did it come from? 
There will be bone and sinew in the 
country fifty years from now. How much 
of it will be the product of this easy-come 
money.? There are 1,100 brokers on the 
New York Stock Exchange. The num- 
ber includes many strong, upright, and 
remarkable men. Their trade is con- 
sidered to be about the best paid trade 
in sight. I do not know of any trade in 
which the same amount of ability, integ- 
rity, and work gains as much money as in 
the stock broker's trade. Is it a good 
trade.? It has its good points and un- 
doubtedly it has its good men. More- 
over, it is a trade that is indispensable to 
the business of the country. But as com- 
monly conducted it must be pretty trying 
to the sensibilities. To be a doctor and 
see folks' physical sores has its draw- 
backs, but to be a broker, and have the 
cupidity of one's fellows under constant 
inspection, must be a good deal worse. 

[246] 



SPECULATION 

Moreover, the doctors have the happiness 
to relieve suffering and help to cure 
disease, but the brokers don't make many 
cures. Like the doctors they live by 
disease, but their office is rather to pro- 
mote than abate it. Certainly the brok- 
er's trade deserves to be profitable, it must 
be so unpleasant. 

It really is more blessed to give than to 
receive, and analogously it is more blessed 
to give a fair equivalent for what you take. 
That accords better with the impulses of a 
sound heart than to take and give nothing. 
To get the best of a bargain is only less dis- 
gusting than to get the worst of it, and 
much of the time it is more disgusting. 
The man through whose fingers the ticker 
tape is running, has his whole attention 
concentrated on this sordid effort to get 
the better of a bargain. He is not even 
striving, as he may properly do, to get a 
just price for his own, for as a rule he 
owns not much more of what he buys or 

[U7] 



SPECULATION 

sells than the privilege of buying or sell- 
ing it. The game at its best is dog eat 
dog, and at its ordinary worst it is dog 
eat rabbit. To play it as a game is more 
tolerable than to make serious work of it, 
but it is a game that is apt to run away 
with its players, and absorb more thought, 
if not more money, than they can 
spare. 

That is the worst of stock speculation 
— its devastating and unsettling effect 
upon the mind. It is the enemy of tran- 
quillity, of concentration, of all lofty 
thought. It is engrossing, and incurably 
sordid. It is stimulating in an unhealth- 
ful way that induces restlessness and calls 
for exciting pleasures as the alternative 
to anxious thoughts. It destroys thrift, 
and the rapidity of its gains, when there 
are gains, makes the slower profits of 
work seem derisory. And it undermines 
and coarsens character. The very foun- 
dation of character is honesty, and the 

[US] 



SPECULATION 

pith of honesty is to give good value for 
what you get. But nearly all stock 
speculation is an effort to gain, without 
due labour or return, values that some 
one else has produced. 

It may be that as much as that can 
be said of most of the processes by which 
folks get rich. If that is true, so much 
the worse for the other processes. Many 
of them are disenchanting enough. There 
is usually a considerable proportion of 
flint in the make-up of fortune-builders, 
and comparatively few of them get rich 
as the result of treatment taken for en- 
largement of the heart. Nevertheless 
great wealth that comes as the result of 
great services rendered has a different 
quality from the easy-come money that 
results from having the wit or the luck 
to hold out one's apron when the plum 
tree is shaken. Money ought to be, but 
is not, a measure of service. We ought 
to b^ but are not, ashamed to take more 

[ 249 ] 



SPECULATION 

than we are worth. But at least it helps 
our self-respect to go through some rea- 
sonable motions of making a return for 
what we get. 

November, 1906. 



[250] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST 
POLICY? 

The saying that "every man has his 
price" was always a mean, underbred re- 
mark. There are honest men: a great 
many of them. I hope a larger propor- 
tion of the visible supply of men are 
honest than used to be. I hope so, but 
I am not sure. I wish the honest men 
would advertise more, for the men whose 
honesty is questioned are advertised now- 
adays in such numbers and so profusely, 
that it makes one uneasy for fear that the 
American standards of morality are crum- 
bling. The special peculiarity of our 
times is not that men succeed by dint of 
methods which the average man regards 
as dishonest, but that such men are re- 
spected and trusted, their methods and 
their success admired, while people who 

[251] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

blink at what is known of their records 
are looked upon as *' fussy." The con- 
sciousness of the existence of this state 
of things finds constant expression. 
Frederick Trevor Hill says in a recent 
magazine article: ''A high sense of hon- 
our is no longer required by our social 
code, and we are daily making fewer and 
less insistent demands upon ourselves and 
others in this regard." 

The president of a manufacturing cor- 
poration discussing in another magazine 
whether private or public business is 
more corrupt, declares that though the 
small, coarse frauds which used to be 
practised by small tradesmen have pretty 
much disappeared, '*the evils of dis- 
honesty and indolence have grown with 
the growth of big corporations, until they 
far exceed those evils in the public busi- 
ness." We read the papers. If a man 
doesn't want anything very much and is 
content to do nothing of much conse- 

[252] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

quence, it is as easy for him to be honest 
as it ever was. But if he wants to get 
very rich, or has aspirations that carry 
him deep into the competitions of busi- 
ness, to be honest becomes, it would seem, 
a highly complicated matter, wherein 
success, if achieved at all, seems apt to be 
achieved at the cost of whatever else he 
is after. 

Do you think there is such a thing as 
absolute honesty? There are plenty of 
people who won't steal, if they realize it's 
stealing, and a good many who won't lie, 
if they realize it's lying, but when stealing 
or lying comes disguised as self-defence, 
or legitimate enterprise, they may feel 
differently. The safest theory seems to 
be that men are naturally dishonest — 
naturally prone to protect themselves by 
lies and evasions and to find their ad- 
vantages in wiles, and that a high degree 
of integrity is an achievement of civiliza- 
tion or a triumph of superior souls. 

r 253 1 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

A certain amount of honesty is now 
necessary for the successful transaction 
of most business. The law must be re- 
spected in cases where its infraction is 
likely to be punished. But what is the 
law as to honesty? Go back to one of 
the foundations of our written law. 
Take the ten commandments — one says : 
*'Thou shalt not steal," and another 
"Thou shalt not bear false witness." 
Only those two bear directly on the sub- 
ject. But another says: "Thou shalt 
not covet." There comes the rub. Men 
who steal, sometimes get sent to prison, 
if the proof is satisfactory to the jury and 
the higher courts do not grant too many 
new trials. So, men who bear false wit- 
ness are sometimes inconvenienced by 
action of the courts. But there is no 
attempt made to hinder men by legal 
process from coveting. On the contrary, 
some men who have shown themselves to 
be successfully covetous, and have man- 

[254] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

aged to acquire large quantities of their 
neighbour's possessions without being 
sent to jail, enjoy a large measure of the 
public respect. 

I was going to say "without becoming 
amenable to law" instead of ''without be- 
ing sent to jail," but that wouldn't do. 
We don't seem to care much just now 
whether a successful money-maker be- 
comes amenable to law or not, so long as 
the law doesn't actually catch and hold 
him. There are no laws against coveting, 
but there are laws against some of the 
practical manifestations of covetousness. 
There are laws restricting railroads from 
favouring one business concern to the prej- 
udice of others in the same line; all sorts 
of laws regulating attempts to establish 
monopolies; laws general and particular 
which seek to prevent the successful swine 
from getting all their feet into the trough. 
But many of these laws seem to impose 
little or no moral obligation. Highly 

[^55] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

respectable men, whose honesty in or- 
dinary matters is not questioned, think 
nothing of breaking them, or hiring their 
employees to break them. They are 
afraid of nothing but being caught, and 
not much afraid of that, because they 
would not feel disgraced if they were 
caught breaking a statute. They would 
merely pay a fine and go on. If you 
make honesty include legality and con- 
sider statute-breaking dishonest, then hon- 
esty seems to be doubtful policy just now, 
for when you say "Honesty is the best 
policy," you mean business policy. You 
simply mean that, in the long run, it pays 
the most money. But it certainly seems 
to pay nowadays to disregard statutes. 

It is not easy to say what honesty is in 
these times, because there is so much of 
the double standard in business, just as 
there usually is in a boys' school. It is 
as though pocket-picking and burglary 
were discountenanced, but highway rob- 

[256] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

bery allowed. A man who aspires to be 
an honest man, being questioned on this 
subject lately, said: **So many objec- 
tionable things that won't bear the light 
are necessary to be done in so many con- 
siderable business enterprises now, that 
for my part I prefer to keep out of active 
business. For if you start out to carry 
a project through, you don't want to fail, 
and to succeed you have to do what is 
necessary." Happily this fastidious man 
can live on his income without discom- 
fort, but he is an able man, and with 
good brains he lives comparatively idle, 
partly because the things he covets most 
are clean hands and self-respect. 

Perhaps business was always just as 
full of deviousness as it is now. Perhaps 
there was always a double standard of 
morals in it. Perhaps laws were always 
regarded as artificial obstacles to success- 
ful trade, which an able man might prop- 
erly employ his wits to circumvent. Per- 

r 257 1 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

haps the prevalent clamour about the 
crookedness of modern business methods 
is only a clamour of croakers and of men 
who praise the good old times. But there 
are some contemporary facts and circum- 
stances which seem to support the con- 
tention that business morals are more 
muddled than usual. For one thing com- 
petition in business is unprecedentedly 
active. Generally speaking, the margin of 
profit is far smaller than it was twenty 
years ago, profitable opportunities are 
scarcer, and the number of persons who 
are watching to seize them is greater than 
it was. That has made business more like 
war than it used to be, and has made many 
people feel that all's fair in business, just 
as all's fair in war. Then there has been 
a vast growth of corporations, and cor- 
porations have no souls and not much 
moral sense. A corporation can't be 
damned. The worst that can happen to 
it is to be forced into bankruptcy. Sal- 

[ 258 ] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

vation for a corporation is dividends, and 
the men who manage corporations are 
prone to keep their corporation's salva- 
tion and their own personal salvation 
separate. Most of them as individuals 
have scruples and ideals of conduct, but 
when they work for the salvation of their 
corporation, they are apt to put their per- 
sonal scruples aside. It is war and they 
are generals. If there are statutes in the 
way, they find a way around or through 
them; if there are rivals to crush — there 
always are — they crush them, if they can; 
if there are common councils or legislat- 
ures to bribe, they bribe them. Gather 
six upright men, no one of whom would 
steal an umbrella, no one of whom, per- 
haps, would steal or even smuggle a fur 
overcoat; organize them as a board of 
directors, and put it to them whether they 
shall disband or do what is necessary, 
and somehow what is necessary will usu- 
ally be done if it is practicable. The 

[259] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

fact that you have six Dr. Jekylls on 
your board of directors does not seem 
to insure the board from becoming like 
Hyde. 

And why ? Well, division of responsi- 
bility is a great help to the conscience. 
And then your board of Jekylls knows 
that it is in competition with a board that 
it esteems to be all Hydes, and which will 
stick at nothing which seems necessary to 
success. Accordingly the board that is 
most faithful to its duty, to its stock-hold- 
ers, including widows, orphans, and other 
trustful and deserving persons, is the one 
that does what is necessary and does it 
first. 

Moreover, there is much to weaken the 
respect of directors, as well as individuals, 
for the product of law-making bodies. 
Laws are no longer handed down on stone 
tablets to a prophet on a smoking moun- 
tain. They are made by elective assem- 
blies, at the instance of persons concerned. 

[260] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

Many kinds of business depend absolutely 
on favouring statutes, and many statutes 
are the result of the efforts of persons who 
expect to find a profit in them. The 
tariff which puts one concern up puts an- 
other down. The beaten party in a great 
struggle for commercial supremacy goes 
to Congress and gets a bill passed pro- 
hibiting its successful rival from continu- 
ing the practices by dint of which it won. 
Not unnaturally the victor regards the 
new law as simply a wile of the enemy 
carrying no moral obligation, and to be 
evaded if possible. "Strikers" with leg- 
islative influence introduce bills for the 
purpose of being paid to let them drop. 
The laws are not the immutable condi- 
tions under which business is to be done; 
they are part of the apparatus for doing 
business, and only immutable so long as 
no business influence is powerful enough 
to have them changed to suit its needs. 
And so laws, as laws, are not so much 

[261] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

respected as they should be, and because 
law and morals have been closely asso- 
ciated in times past, disregard or evasion 
of law tends to lower moral standards. 
Corporations which have no souls to be 
damned have pockets to be picked, and 
are even more busy in defending them- 
selves from plunder than in offensive 
illegalities. Out in Montana, where the 
great copper mine fight is going on, it is 
averred that not the laws alone, but the 
courts are part of the apparatus of doing 
business, and that the success of an ad- 
venturous person who has fought a power- 
ful trust has been due to his ability to 
control the election of judges who favour 
his side. Happily the courts as a rule are 
still respected, and it is a very rare thing 
for the integrity of an American judge to 
be doubted. But the best courts cannot 
punish law-breakers who are not caught, 
nor all of those who are caught. 

I hear it said of foot-ball — that very 

[2621 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

serious sport so much vaunted as a means 
of fitly training strenuous spirits for the 
the battle of contemporary life — that the 
man who can most successfully evade 
the rules is rated as the best player; that 
whatever effective act the referee cannot 
see is good play, whether rules forbid it 
or not ; that the last word of the successful 
coach to his men is, "Do up the man 
opposite you!" How the opponent is 
"done up" does not matter unless the 
referee sees and objects. The rules are for 
him to enforce, not necessarily for the 
players to obey. And so it seems to be 
in modern business. An able and highly 
respected lawyer said to a friend about a 
year ago, that the greater part of his law 
practice consisted in advising men of 
business how to do illegal things with 
safety. He has since died, leaving life 
insurance enough to pay back half a 
million dollars he had stolen, and make 
his heirs rich besides. I wonder whether 

[263] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

his familiarity with contemporary busi- 
ness methods had affected his own moral 
sense, or whether a naturally defective 
moral sense had made him successful as 
a business man's advisor! Perhaps he 
got tired of subtleties > for his own steal- 
ings were of the simplest and crudest 
criminality, and his lying was downright 
and well stuck to. Dishonesty was the 
height of folly for him, for he defied 
statute, common and moral law, deceived 
those who trusted him and stole from his 
friends and his clients. Dishonesty that 
keeps faith with no one is of course as 
impolitic as the copy-books aver, but this 
current dishonesty that disregards stat- 
utes, elects legislatures or bribes them, 
and fights the devil with fire, is that bad 
policy also ? 

It was said with humour and with 
truth of a modern man of business that 
he never violated the penal code. Can a 
man who will not buy a vote, nor bribe 

[264] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

a legislature, nor consciously violate a 
statute, afford, in these days, to own a 
railroad ? Could he succeed as manager 
of a great competitive trust ? Of course, 
such a man could make a living. He 
could practise medicine, or be a minister, 
or write stories for the magazines, or paint 
pictures. He could even practise law, 
though possibly at some disadvantage in 
some particulars, and there are many lines 
of business, some of them highly profit- 
able, in which he would not necessarily 
be embarrassed. But when it comes to 
great competitive business, with labour 
unions and their business agents, sharp 
and powerful business rivals, legislative 
strikers, and all that host to contend with, 
could he get along ? Inter arma leges silent. 
Isn't business on that scale too much like 
war to be conducted on lawful peace lines ? 
If our man respected the law, would the 
law protect him, or would it merely hold 
him while his pockets were rifled ? 

[ 265 ] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

These questions are too much for me to 
answer. I only read what other people 
read and hear what other people hear, of 
tariff-made fortunes, of fortune-made 
tariffs, of men who own State legislatures 
and have laws made to order, of business 
concerns that habitually defy statutes or 
evade them, of men so rich that money is 
tight when they close their hands and easy 
when they open them. One can under- 
stand that a great many sudden turns and 
shifty expedients may be necessary when 
the factors that control success are so 
varied and so mutable. 

We read the story of the Shipyard 
Trust; we recall what we have heard of 
the proceedings prior to the formation of 
the Whiskey Trust, where rival gangs 
found it necessary to burn down com- 
peting distilleries; we read Miss Tar- 
bell's tale of the Standard Oil Company; 
we see a Senator sitting in a Senate that 
once rejected him, and we see his great 

[2661 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

house rising on Fifth Avenue; and fur- 
ther up Mr. Carnegie's great house, and 
the ambitious dwellings of the steel men. 
We meditate on legislative corruption, and 
speculate as to what proportion of the 
huge gains of the steel men was due to 
tariffs improperly maintained and to the 
power of compelling railroads to grant 
unlawful favours. We take it for granted 
that in nearly every great business that 
depends upon a public franchise or upon 
special legislation, money has been cor- 
ruptly used to elect legislators, influence 
legislations or pacify objectors. We are 
not very much shocked about it. We feel 
that it had to be used or there would have 
been no great improvements in transpor- 
tation or manufacture, and no profit in 
the business. We admire the men who 
get results, even though they get them by 
unlawful means. And much of our ad- 
miration is warranted, for there is a great 
deal more to the success of the commer- 

[ 267 ] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

cially successful men than mere unscrupu- 
lousness. There is great talent usually, 
great energy, generalship, courage, and 
executive force. Mere rapacity we don't 
presume to condemn. As I said, the 
commandment against coveting seems to 
be obsolete, and to covet one's neighbour's 
business, his factory, his railroad, his 
bonds, and his stocks, and make him give 
them up, isn't wrong according to our 
code. We still feel that a man should 
not covet his neighbour's wife, but if he 
does, and gets her, we are not very dis- 
agreeable about it. A large, aggressive, 
calculated covetousness results in the con- 
solidation of interests and in vast econo- 
mies of administration, manufacture, and 
distribution. It is a law of nature that 
the rivers shall flow into the sea. Hur- 
rah for the sea! Mr. Rockefeller and 
others seem to have taught us that it 
is the lawful aspiration of a righteous 
man to be the sea and receive, and 



IS HONEST! STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

if necessary extort, the tribute of the 
rivers. 

If limitless rapacity is admirable, if it is 
the duty of the man with ten talents to 
make them a hundred, and the duty of the 
man with a hundred talents to make them 
a hundred thousand, I don't see that the 
degree of honesty that would hinder a 
man from breaking statutes is any longer 
the best business policy, or even practi- 
cable. You may say that it is a disad- 
vantage to be made the steward of inter- 
ests so important and valuable that it is 
necessary to hire men to lie and to bribe, 
and to break statutes in defence of them. 
I agree that much may be said in sup- 
port of that view. I agree as to the 
advantages of humbler circumstances to 
the attainment of which a high degree of 
rapacity is not necessary, and which may 
be enjoyed without violence to any of the 
commandments, or even of the revised 
statutes. But that has to do with morals 

[ 269 ] 



IS HONESTY STILL THE BEST POLICY? 

and ideals and the concerns of the spirit. 
We are considering the business proposi- 
tion. Let us not be so sweeping. Let 
us make that old saw read: "Some hon- 
esty is good policy." That's true. We 
can all agree to it. Without some hon- 
esty business could not be done. Credit 
would go to the dogs and money would 
be tight all the time. A broker's nod 
must be as good as his bond ; bookmakers 
must not be welchers; goods must be 
according to sample; contracts must be 
fulfilled. Honesty to that extent is cer- 
tainly indispensable. But when it comes 
to statute-breaking, if you would avoid 
that, take care what business you go into, 
or give over altogether aspirations that are 
too lofty, and say with Horace, even if, 
like him, you don't mean it : ** Naked I seek 
the camp of those who desire nothing."* 

October, 1904. 

*Note: a great deal has happened to make honesty 
politic in the four years since the above discourse was 
written. 

[ 270 ] 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF THE 
COMMON LOT 

We are used to look grave when a 
young man takes a wife unto himself with 
what seems to us to be undue precipita- 
tion, and if presently we see a young 
family growing punctually up around 
him, maybe we wag our heads a bit and 
say it was a pity that young Buxton did 
not wait until he had got a round or two 
further up the ladder. We say we don't 
like to see a likely young fellow over- 
weighted at the start, and we know of men 
of promise who incurred domestic bless- 
ings so early in life and in such numbers 
that all their lives they never did better 
than to stagger on under their load. We 
say they never had a chance to get where 
they belonged, and we fear it is going to 
be so with that young Buxton. 

r 271 1 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF 

Maybe it is. It depends a great deal 
upon Buxton and what sort he is, and 
how hard he can work and to what pur- 
pose, and how long he can deny himself 
such expensive luxuries as appendicitis 
and typhoid fever. Of course, Buxton 
must have a start — must have learned 
his trade and see his work ahead of him — 
before he marries; or else he must have 
means of maintenance that do not depend 
upon his labours. If he is just an im- 
provident creature who is trusting to luck, 
no doubt he will come to grief, and we 
wash our hands of him. It depends also 
on the other young person, and what 
sort she is and what she knows, and what 
she was brought up to. And it depends 
somewhat on circumstances. Circum- 
stances are always waiting and wanting to 
cut into the game of life, and though they 
don't often, and ought never to, control it, 
they certainly do make differences, and 
alter some cases. 

[ 272 ] 



THE COMMON LOT 

But if Buxton has got his start and 
seems to be the right sort, and if that 
demure young Lucy seems to have some 
hard sense and due constancy, in what- 
ever disguise, under her ribbons and mus- 
lin, let's not croak unduly nor forecast a 
lot of bogie troubles that are not actually 
in sight. Keeping body and soul to- 
gether is not quite so desperately compli- 
cated a task as some of us have grown to 
think it. Lots of people don't starve to 
death. All the folks we see in the street 
are clothed, somehow, though some in 
gayer raiment than others. Let us not 
even despair when there are little Bux- 
tons, not even if they seem at first to 
crowd on one another's heels. They 
won't crowd one another nearly so hard 
as they crowd Buxton, and if he is so 
built as to stand the pressure, it will do 
him good. 

It is an ill fate for a man to be work- 
ing merely for himself. That motive is 

[273] 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF 

proper enough to begin with. Duty as 
well as self-interest demands that he 
should justify his presence in the world. 
But to want for yourself all that is com- 
ing to you, is not graceful. It seems a 
bit greedy. To want it for a wife and 
children is selfishness so deodorized and 
etherialized that it becomes very like a 
virtue. When Erskine's chance finally 
came after a long period of brieflessness, 
he bore himself in court at the very first 
go with such audacious ability as made 
his reputation on the spot. Some one 
asked him afterward, "How did you do 
it.? What kept you up to such a pitch 
as that.?" He said, "I felt my children 
tugging at my gown and crying, 'Father, 
bring us bread.'" 

I admit that a wife and young children 
are not a sure advantage to a poor young 
man in politics, unless politics dovetail into 
his other business; I admit that a large 
and early family seems often a doubtful 

[274] 



THE COMMON LOT 

advantage to a beginning minister or 
painter; but neither politics nor the min- 
istry nor art are money-making profes- 
sions, though in all of them there are 
rewards — even pecuniary ones — that come 
to energy and industry and talent, and do 
not come to lazy men. Nothing is better 
at the right time for a young man who has 
in him the making of a strong man, than 
a burden that is well up to the measure 
of his strength. And certainly in those 
callings in which success is measured, 
however imperfectly, by the annual har- 
vest of dollars, the imperative need of 
money is a very useful spur. 

If Buxton does no more than merely 
support his family and keep out of debt; 
if he never gets rich, never rides in cabs, 
never gets to Europe, never lays up much 
more than a modest provision of life in- 
surance, and his nose is kept pretty near 
the grindstone most of his days to do that, 
is even such a prospect fit to daunt him 

[275] 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF 

in his matrimonial hopes ? I don't think 
it should. As against marrying the 
woman he loves, and rearing and educat- 
ing good children to love him and come 
after him, what has life to offer that is 
better ? We Americans all want some- 
thing better than the common lot. If 
we don't think that some day we are go- 
ing to be rich, or that some day our 
children are going to be rich or in some 
way remarkable, we are disposed to ques- 
tion the profitableness of existence and of 
raising families. Yet the common lot, if 
one brings the right spirit to it, and con- 
templates it from the right point of view, 
is far from bad. It is a natural condition, 
that is one good point about it. It is con- 
sistent with the highest spiritual develop- 
ment. It abounds in little daily oppor- 
tunities of service and of happiness, and 
the door of promotion can never be closed 
to it. The common lot is to live and 
work and reproduce your species. No 

[276] 



THE COMMON LOT 

lot that eliminates any of these incidents 
is necessarily to be preferred to it or will 
be preferred except for unusual reasons 
by a wise person who has a choice. To 
better the common lot for himself is 
every man's privilege, and there would 
be little progress in the world if he did 
not try to do it. But it is a delusion of 
self-indulgence to reject, or postpone too 
long, any of the common blessings that it 
offers with the idea that there are better 
things in life to be had for the price of 
those. There is no single interest in life, 
for example, to be compared with children. 
The world is practically agreed about 
them. Taking them by and large, noth- 
ing pays so well to have ; nothing pays so 
well to work for. The rearing of them 
combines the moral satisfaction of per- 
forming a duty, with the speculative ex- 
citement of a quest for buried treasure. 
Blessed is he whose quiver is full of them, 
but not too full; not in these times. The 

[277] 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF 

blessings of the common lot in our day do 
not include a large family. That calls for 
a lot that is out of common. 

The suggestion that a large, early 
family might not be an advantage to a 
beginning minister, should not be under- 
stood to imply any failure to appreciate 
the advantageous position from which 
ministers' children make their attempt to 
solve the problem of prosperity. The 
proportion of them who achieve what we 
somewhat narrowly esteem to be success, 
seems to be exceptionally large, and the 
children of professors and teachers and 
of judges have the same sort of advantage. 
I don't know what the statistics are about 
them, but there is Mr. Root, a professor's 
son; Judge Taft, a judge's son; Mr. 
Cleveland, a minister's son; Mr. Harri- 
man, a minister's son; Mr. Morgan, a 
minister's grandson, and every reader 
can extend the list indefinitely out of his 
own acquaintance. It is good luck to 

[2781 



THE COMMON LOT 

have a minister back of you somewhere 
in your family. A judge will do as well, 
perhaps, in these days, or a professor — 
an Agassiz, say, who had no time to make 
money. Somehow the descendants of 
really superior men who had no time to 
make money seem apt to have both the 
capacity and disposition to make up for 
their forebears' neglect. The point is 
that the minister's children or the judge's 
or the professor's usually get all the edu- 
cation that is to be had, and sound moral 
training with it. And even the judges 
are apt to be not so rich but that their 
children may learn self-help, and the 
minister's and professor's children are 
apt to have a sharp enough experience of 
the inconvenience of limited means, to 
start them in life with an appetite. 
There are considerable advantages about 
starting in life with an appetite, though 
of course, it may be too voracious and 
neglectful of niceties. There is Jonson 

[ 279 ] 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF 

who is paid for knowing certain things 
and exercising his judgment, and who 
makes money so easily that I think he 
merely hangs out a money-bag overnight 
and the watchman fills it. Jonson's 
father had quantities of learning, but the 
market for what he knew was bad in the 
place where he lived, and privation was 
liberally mixed into his lot. But he in- 
curred responsibility for the maintenance 
of a boy, and the boy was bright, and the 
father having little else to give him, per- 
sonally filled him up with all the knowl- 
edge he could cram into him. No doubt, 
he grounded him in honesty besides, and 
having done what he could, let him out, a 
mere boy still, to make a crop and har- 
vest it in the busy world. The boy went 
out with good faculties already trained 
and proceeded to get more knowledge and 
to use it. But the new knowledge that he 
got had to do with business and was mar- 
ketable, and by the time he was grown 

[280] 



THE COMMON LOT 

up and had filled his head full of it, there 
was no more short commons for him or 
his. 

One point of this story seems to be that 
if you have a bright boy and teach him 
well and bring him up under circum- 
stances that compel him to appreciate the 
value of money, he will go and get some 
when he is big enough. The story works 
that way: it can't be helped. But the 
preferred point is that a parent who is 
bad at earning money and cannot do 
what he wants to do for his children in 
that way, may possibly do even better for 
them out of the work of his own heart and 
his own mind. 

With the increase of wealth in this 
country and the general rise in wages, the 
practice of looking upon children as the 
possible source of revenue seems to have 
lost very much of its vogue. Two gen- 
erations ago high schools were scarce, 
colleges were few and small, and school- 

[281] 



SOME ADVANTAGES OF 

ing was over for the great majority of 
children at a comparatively early age. 
Most of the boys went to work at fifteen, 
or sooner, and their wages belonged to 
their parents until they were twenty-one 
unless indeed they managed to buy their 
time from their fathers, or to find some 
one who would buy it for them. And 
commonly, though of course not uni- 
versally, the fathers enforced their rights, 
and fairly well-to-do men gathered in 
their children's wages as a matter of 
course. The old rule still holds, and the 
old practice still obtains in families where 
the ways-and-means problem is one of 
pressing exigency, but nowadays among 
people who are not desperately pressed, 
the prevailing sentiment is that as be- 
tween parent and child, it is very much 
more blessed in money matters for the 
parent to give than to receive. 

The old practice simplified the raising 
of families, and families were larger in 

[ 282 ] 



THE COMMON LOT 

those times. The families now in which 
this old rule governs are apt to be larger 
than the families in which it is unknown. 
It isn't an unjust rule. It tends to hold 
families together and to make the family, 
rather than the individual, the social unit, 
and those are good results. But our 
ambitious modern fashion of keeping 
boys as well as girls, as long as we can 
at their books or in some school of train- 
ing, makes better for the stimulation of 
energy in working parents. We think it 
is better for the children, too, and profit- 
able all around in the long run. 

Let us try to be hopeful, then, about 
all the newly married, and especially let 
us not worry about that young Buxton, 
or concede that he is in danger of blight- 
ing his career by getting married while 
he is still a hopeful subject for that con- 
dition. He is none too precious to be 
supporting a family, and if the effort 
drives him a little, it is more likely to do 

[283] 



THE COMMON LOT 

him good than harm. To spend a little 
less money for champagne and a little 
more for sterilized milk won't really prej- 
udice either his happiness or his effi- 
ciency as part of the great social machine. 



[284] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

It was related two months ago how 
the "suffragettes" stormed the House of 
Commons and, faihng to get what they 
wanted, would not be appeased, but 
stormed the more and were dragged to 
court. There some of them, disdaining 
to give bonds to keep the peace, were 
gratified by short terms of imprisonment. 
They were gratified by it because the out- 
break was an advertisement of the seri- 
ousness and urgency of the conviction of 
the *' suffragettes" that Englishwomen 
ought to vote, and that it was time that 
Englishmen made up their minds to share 
that duty with them. 

In France, they tell us, the efforts tow- 
ard a more complete separation of state 
and church and the elimination of 

[ 285 ] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

church influence from politics have led 
the Catholic Church to favour woman 
suffrage. In England some of the fore- 
most statesmen, both of the government 
and of the opposition, profess to have 
come to the belief that women ought to 
vote. In this country when that vener- 
able periodical, the North American Re- 
view, lately became a fortnightly, and for 
the first time set up some definite opinions 
of its own, the first opinion with which it 
accentuated its new departure was that 
American women were now ready for 
the suffrage and ought to have it. All 
these incidents have brought a well-worn 
topic a little more than usual to the 
fore. 

The great mass of American men and 
women are not persuaded as yet that 
women ought to have the suffrage. The 
idea of woman suffrage is perfectly famil- 
iar. There is a little company of women 
who are devoted to its accomplishment, 

[286] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

and another little company of women 
who have been constrained to organize 
against it for fear that the aggressive 
suffragists would win their fight by de- 
fault if nobody met them with definite 
and organized opposition. But the mass 
of the people do not bother their heads 
about it one way or the other, and the 
attitude of most of the more thoughtful 
people toward it is merely contemplative. 
They are ready to be persuaded that it is 
expedient that women should vote, but 
as yet they have not been persuaded. 
Not being for it they are necessarily 
against it, and, joined with all the mass 
of people who do not think about it at 
all, they constitute the enormous vis 
inerticB which the aggressive suffragists 
must overcome before they can have 
their way. 

Are they going to overcome it.^ A 
huge conservative force that, on the 
whole, is fairly well satisfied with things 

I [287] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

as they are and dreads the jolt of any 
fundamental change, is an exceedingly 
valuable asset of any people, and makes 
in most important measure for peace, 
order, and continuity of government. 
But as where such a force is lacking 
there is change, disquiet, and insecurity, 
so where it is unduly preponderant it 
halts progress. Our country is certainly 
not old-fogy. There are observers who 
hold it to be more conservative than 
Great Britain, and that the very freedom 
of thought and license of speech and 
printed words which obtain here, give so 
much vent for the ebullitions of the rest- 
less and allow so much steam to be blown 
off, that our land is really more conserv- 
ative than most of the monarchies of 
Europe. But still it is not so set in the 
ways that are, as to be in danger of miss- 
ing advantage for lack of mental energy 
to embrace it. Theoretically it is quite 
possible to persuade the American people 

[288] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

that woman suffrage is a good thing, and 
to induce them when persuaded to estab- 
lish it. 

The division on the woman-suffrage 
question does not run on the lines of sex. 
If the women wanted to vote and noth- 
ing hindered them but the difficulty of 
getting the men to consent to it, that would 
not hinder them long. They could get 
the consent of the men to anything under 
the sun as to which they were agreed. 
The men, how, would be glad to give 
the suffrage to the individual women who 
want it if the thing could stop there. 
But it couldn't. If some women in any 
State are to be allowed to vote, all women 
in that State must be allowed to vote; 
and if all women have the privilege of 
voting, it immediately becomes the duty 
of the conscientious and responsible 
women to exercise that privilege to the 
very best of their ability. A limited 
suffrage can be given to women who can 

[289] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

qualify for it. Women can be invited to 
vote for school officers, and women who 
are taxpayers can and should be invited 
to vote for municipal officers, and both of 
these things have already been done in 
many cases. But an unlimited sujBFrage 
can hardly be given to a limited number 
of women. Even if it is theoretically 
possible, it is not thought of as a project 
that is practically worthy of considera- 
tion. In every State, if unlimited suf- 
frage is conferred on women at all-» it will 
be conferred on all of them who are of 
voting age, and on the same terms that 
men have it. All the women will be ex- 
pected to vote, and just as much pains 
will be taken to influence their votes and 
get their votes, out as is now taken with 
the votes of men. 

More of them, too, will run for public 
office than do at present. There is no 
doubt that there are many public offices 
now restricted to men, which competent 

[290] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

women might fill efficiently. The ques- 
tion would be rather what offices they 
were not suited to. The other day the 
federal district attorney in New York 
appointed a woman lawyer to be special 
assistant United States district attorney 
to prosecute an employment agent charged 
with sending immigrants to lumber and 
turpentine camps in the South, where they 
were held in peonage. This woman, Mrs. 
Quackenbos, had this work intrusted to 
her because it was through her efforts, 
including visits to the Southern camps 
complained of, that the federal authorities 
came to be interested in the case. There 
is no doubt that there are many individual 
women who are capable of creditable per- 
formance of most of the public services 
now commonly rendered (not always 
creditably) by men. Women at a pinch 
can usually do men's work, provided that 
they have a fair chance to learn it. So 
can men do women's work, and they are 

[ 291 1 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

particularly successful as cooks and dress- 
makers. Nevertheless there is some- 
thing approaching a general agreement 
that the existing division of labour, by 
which certain tasks usually fall to men 
and certain others to women, is on the 
whole a division that suits both the 
women and the men, and one that it is 
expedient to preserve. In Colorado, 
where women vote, the papers say that 
women have not proved popular candi- 
dates for office, though they seem to be 
faithful and effectual voters. 

The remark that the early suffragists 
were fond of exploding — that the sujBFrage 
was denied to women, idiots, and crim- 
inals — never had anything more than a 
rhetorical value. Perhaps the intelligence 
and capacity of women [in certain lines 
have come to be more respected than 
they were fifty years ago; and justly, on 
the ground that the education of women 
is broader and deeper now than it was 

[292] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

then, and their participation in affairs is 
much more extensive. But the withhold- 
ing of the suffrage from women was never 
based so much on disparagement of 
woman's intelligence as on a disbelief 
that direct participation in government 
belonged in the class of duties that are in 
her line. The controlling influence that 
affects the opinions of men about woman 
suffrage, is that they like women as they 
are and don't want to favour anything 
that may change them. The same influ- 
ence controls the opinions of the great 
majority of women. On the whole they 
like their job as it is, or at least prefer it 
as it is, to what they think it might be if 
modified by woman suffrage. The com- 
mon run of men are not hoggish of politi- 
cal power. The difficulty is to get them 
to put a high enough value on it. They 
do not regard it as too precious a birth- 
right to be shared with women. Their 
opinion is rather that woman is too 

[293] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

precious to be hampered with an addi- 
tional obligation. 

Perhaps the suffragists will laugh at 
that. Of course it is not universally true, 
but substantially it is true. It may be 
said that mere selfish regard for his own 
convenience may make a man reluctant 
to have his wife vote, just as it sometimes 
makes a woman try to deny to her maid- 
servants the inalienable privilege of hav- 
ing beaus. Such is the imperfection of 
our fallen natures that even American 
husbands are sometimes selfish about 
their wives, and so are sons about their 
mothers. But how is it about daugh- 
ters? Does there exist on a large scale 
anywhere so notorious an infatuation as 
that of the American father with his 
daughters ? Is he selfish about them ? 
Is there any good thing on the earth 
that he does not want to get for them ? 
Would he raise a finger to keep them 
from voting if they wanted to vote, or 

r 294 1 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

if he thought it might be profitable to 
them ? 

He would not object. Regard for his 
own convenience would not influence him, 
for he would be delighted to have his 
daughters' company to the polls. Neither 
would he be concerned about the con- 
venience of his future sons-in-law, for his 
forecasting mind is hostile, if anything, to 
sons-in-law, and, so far as he is himself 
concerned, he is apt to think of them only 
as a necessary evil. If he does not bestir 
himself to get votes for his girls, it is 
purely because he does not think it would 
pay his girls to have votes. 

Almost always men reflect the opinions 
of their women folks in this matter. You 
will recall that Robinson, the eloquent 
champion of woman suffrage, was the hus- 
band of one of the Brown girls, and that 
all the Browns were as ardent for woman 
suffrage as their parents were for anti- 
slavery. Robinson could not have stayed 

[ 295 ] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

comfortably married in that family if he 
had not come out for woman suffrage. 
Of course he came out for ito He would 
have been a foolish man and neglectful 
of his obligations as a husband and a son- 
in-law if he hadn't. 

So when Smith suddenly declared for 
woman suffrage in his newspaper, you 
wonder what put that idea into Smith's 
head. You asked him, and he said, oh, 
he was tired of men voters. You won- 
dered some more ; recalled that any lively, 
unexpected idea or declaration was use- 
ful to a newspaper, but still wondered, un- 
til it flashed across your mind that Mrs. 
Smith might have come to feel she would 
like to vote. Of course either his own 
wife or some other man's wife put him 
up to it. 

The most important of woman's rights 
is the right to have children of her own, 
and raise them. To vote may help or 
harm her, but not much either way. It 

[296] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

is not a vital matter. The other right 
is vital; a true birthright. Our society 
takes a vast deal of pains to secure its 
realization, but not enough. It is the 
first desire of most parents — of all wise 
ones — that their girls shall marry good 
men and be fit wives for them, but the 
aim is imperfectly accomplished. Some 
observers say that American parents are 
at fault in not realizing betimes the im- 
perative need of laying up money for 
their daughters' marriage portions. Per- 
haps so. At any rate too large a propor- 
tion of oui women, for one reason or 
another, do not marry, and go to their 
graves an honourable and useful but 
pathetic procession of women deprived of 
their rights. There is a sentiment, how 
well founded need not here be discussed, 
that women, if they had the suffrage, 
would interest themselves in politics to the 
detriment of their vastly more important 
family interests. They might go into 

[297] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

politics young and neglect to get married, 
just as in too many cases they now are 
constrained to go into money-making 
occupations and (some of them) neglect 
to get married. That sentiment has a 
good deal to do with keeping ballots out 
of women's hands. 

If it were practicable to give the suf- 
frage to all spinsters at the age of thirty- 
five, a good deal could be said in favour 
of it. A great many of them would be 
very valuable voters. It would add in- 
terest to their lives, and would be in the 
nature of a reparation made to them by 
society for the loss of a vastly greater 
privilege which the imperfection of our 
social apparatus has caused them to miss. 
It may even be suggested that the vote of 
every bachelor of thirty-five should be 
taken away and given to a spinster. 
That might be just, but probably not 
expedient, for the reason that grown-up 
bachelors are apt to be useful politicians 

[298] 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE 

for the same reason that spinsters might 
be, because they are not distracted by 
family ties from the cares of state. One 
would like to see a trial of the experiment 
of letting all the unmarried women over 
thirty-five vote, and especially all the 
school teachers and other self-supporting 
women. It would give them power, and 
concede to them equality of privilege in 
certain directions with the unmarried 
men, which certainly most of them de- 
serve. But whether woman suffrage, 
having progressed so far as that, could be 
stopped there, is a question. And prob- 
ably most of the spinsters would not care 
to vote, for women are still women, even 
though thirty-five and unmated. 

January^ 1907. 



[299] 



THE SEASHORE 

"As was, and is, and evermore shall 
be." May we say that of the sea and its 
shore? Of the sea perhaps, unless our 
thought is very comprehensive and deals 
with distances in time even more pro- 
found than the geological periods. But if 
we go on and add, "World without end. 
Amen," we get into trouble, applying to 
things finite — largest things though they 
be — words that belong to the infinite and 
illimitable. But so far as things finite go 
the sea is such an extremely remote back 
number, and promises to keep along into 
so extremely remote a future, that we in 
our little day are well enough warranted 
in thinking of it as the thing — the one 
thing — that always was and always will 
be. 

Before the mountains were brought 

[3001 



THE SEASHORE 

forth, there was the sea, veiled in mists 
and vapours, waiting with immeasurable 
patience for shores to be adjusted to it. 
In the Lord's good time they were ad- 
justed, gradually, tentatively, and with 
successive fittings and readjustments; 
paroxysmally on an enormous scale; less 
obtrusively, by wind and wave, attrition, 
and deposit, on a smaller but indefati- 
gably steady one. Compared with the sea 
itself its shores are modern, but com- 
pared with anything else, some of them 
reach back to a creditable antiquity — 
not so far back as the mountains, but a 
long ways. It is a long time since conti- 
nental forms have changed, but when 
one comes to details, even the rock-bound 
coasts, slowly rising or falling, change 
their contours somewhat from cycle to 
cycle, while some of the sandy ones shift 
their unstable outlines from year to year. 
But variable or not, the seashore is 
always there, and that the sands shift 

[301] 



THE SEASHORE 

and the rocks submit, however reluct- 
antly, to the persuasion of the ages, doesn't 
greatly affect the main proposition. For 
seons uncounted there has been that ir- 
regular line about countries and conti- 
nents where the land meets the water, 
and whenever that line ceases to exist 
there will be no land-born creatures left 
alive to regret its discontinuance. Be- 
yond any plausible doubt it will last 
our time, and I am glad to believe it 
will, for there is no part of the land 
that is more indispenable to the satis- 
faction of us who dwell on it than its 
edges. 

I suspect the seashore was the old 
home of the ancestors of all living peo- 
ple, so strong the impulse is to get back 
to it, and so substantial are the satisfac- 
tions of return. There isn't enough of 
it for us all to live on all the time, and 
even if there were enough, it is undis- 
puted that there are important things to 

[3021 



THE SEASHORE 

be done inland, and that a due propor- 
tion of us must live inland most of the 
time and do them. But observe how 
common it is for folk who have managed 
to accomplish their important inland 
duties so that they can be spared for a 
time, to move themselves and their fami- 
lies off to the seashore and stay there as 
long as things are pleasant. It is this 
propensity that has made the Atlantic 
seaboard from the southern end of New 
Jersey to the northern edge of Maine look 
like a continuous village. Villas, cot- 
tages, and hotels stretch along a thousand 
miles of sinuous coast, crowded often so 
close together that there is not room for 
a bathing-house between, and leaving only 
the most inaccessible reaches bare of hu- 
man habitation. The Atlantic seaboard 
with its great cities has a considerable 
population of its own that likes the sea air 
and the sight and contact of salt water 
in the summer; and since that popula- 

[303] 



THE SEASHORE 

tion, constantly crowding in increased 
numbers to its shore, finds its needs in 
competition with demands of prospered 
families from the thriving inland States, 
it has become evident that the demand 
for the seashore is fast outrunning the 
supply, and that pretty much all the 
available coast remaining is destined 
soon to be cut up into house-lots which 
will be owned by people who can aflFord 
that luxury. 

This prospect in very recent years has 
had the good effect of stirring up some 
far-seeing and public-spirited people to 
exert themselves to promote the purchase 
and reservation of strips of seashore for 
the public use. In New England the late 
Charles Eliot, the landscape architect, 
devoted a share of his useful energies to 
this work with admirable results, pro- 
moting the reservation of several very 
important strips of shore in New Eng- 
land, and spreading with great diligence 

[304] 



THE SEASHORE 

and energy in and beyond New England 
the idea that such reservations are ex- 
ceedingly desirable. When he died that 
particular work lost the most efficient 
friend it had. It has gone on. New 
York talks about making a great seashore 
park at Coney Island, and many other 
like plans are under discussion or in 
process of fulfilment. But there is still 
a vast deal left to be done in the same 
line. Every seashore village that has an 
eye to its own interests ought to secure, 
where it is still possible, such a strip of 
beach as will insure to its own people 
and its summer population, present and 
to come, due access to salt water and en- 
joyment of all its incidents and privileges. 
The seashore villages have been and 
are extremely short-sighted in this mat- 
ter. The seashore can support an im- 
mense summer population within a mile, 
more or less, of the shore. But the shore 
itself is absolutely limited in extent, and 

[305] 



THE SEASHORE 

every village that allows its whole shore 
to go into the hands of private owners, so 
that it cannot offer bath-houses and 
bathing-beaches, seats on the beach, 
wharves, and boat-anchorage to its sum- 
mer visitors, not only allows itself to be 
cut off from its own use of the sea, but 
deprives itself in great measure of the 
chances of gain that come with the in- 
crease of the summer population. If 
people can get to the water, they will go 
and live, not necessarily on it, but near 
it. But they will not care to live near 
it if the whole water-front has been so 
taken up by private owners that they 
cannot go swimming, nor have reason- 
able use of any part of the shore, except 
by the benevolence of some friend. Most 
of the seaboard villages have common 
lands somewhere which have come down 
to them from their provident forbears, 
but the old commons and parks are sel- 
dom on the shore. They usually form 

[306] 



THE SEASHORE 

one side of the main village street. The 
need of saving more of the shore for 
public use than a wharf or two for coasters 
to tie up to is something that has de- 
veloped within thirty or forty years. It 
is a need that as yet has been very imper- 
fectly met, and to provide for it grows 
year by year more diflScult and more 
costly. 

Lakes, great and small, have their 
charms — exceedingly substantial ones — 
and their invaluable uses, too, but they 
are not the sea, and may not rival its 
inspirations. They don't smell like it; 
they don't taste like it; they don't feel 
like it; they have not its illimitable sug- 
gestiveness. There is nothing on the 
bottoms of our American lakes — the best 
lot of lakes in the world — that is really 
worth meditating about. No Spanish 
galleons with bones and treasure in 
them ; no triremes, no long boats of Norse 
pirates, no corals, no considerable store 
[ 307 ] 



THE SEASHORE 

of pearls. And beyond them what is 
there ? The Spanish Main ? Araby ? 
The Isles of Greece ? No ; beyond the 
biggest of them is nothing more than 
Canada; and though Canada has its 
history, fairly well peopled with romantic 
figures, it is very modern. Down to the 
seashore comes all history. The sea is 
the one great common possession of all 
mankind; the one great playground and 
battle-ground and provision-house and 
roadway of the nations. Attempts have 
been made to parcel it out to this country 
or that. Spain once claimed, and Eng- 
land disputed, dominion over vast 
stretches of it; popes have named owners 
for oceans the limits of which were still 
conjectural. But all that has passed. 
Nobody claims the high seas any more. 
They are ours. The wind blows over the 
great lakes and comes clear and cool to 
their borders. It makes good air to 
breathe — wholesome, stimulating — but it 

[308] 



THE SEASHORE 

does not come as the sea-winds do, 
freighted with messages from all man- 
kind and from all history. 

One of the advantages of living in a 
great city is that one is touched and 
animated by great currents of life. In 
spite of all the drawbacks of it, the 
crowding, the driving, the competition 
for space, for air, for a livelihood, there 
are compensations in its ceaseless ac- 
tivities and in the intimacies of its hu- 
man associations which become exceed- 
ingly valuable to persons who have once 
become used to them. Full streets and 
hurrying crowds make an atmosphere 
which comes in time to seem vivifying 
and desirable. It may be a perverted 
taste — this taste for great cities — but it 
is certainly a growing one; and while 
it may lead finally to exhaustion of energy, 
it is at least an effectual antidote to dry- 
rot. There is an analogous stimulation 
about the sea. The seashore-dweller, 

[309] 



THE SEASHORE 

too, is always in touch with an immense 
living force that is always in motion, 
subject to ceaseless changes, terrible, 
amiable, beneficent, and cruel by turns, 
giving life and taking it, but never in- 
different and never torpid. The seashore- 
dweller is a cosmopolitan in his way. 
In older days in our country, before 
railroads simplified and cheapened trans- 
portation, the coast-dweller had the ad- 
vantage of his neighbours inland in 
getting away from home more, and seeing 
distant towns and their people. Every 
seacoast village then had coast-trading 
schooners, and the bigger towns with 
better harbours had whaling-fleets, and 
other ships that sailed for any port that 
promised profit. Not much of that deep- 
sea adventure is left to them nowadays, 
when a large part of the coastwise traflSc 
has gone to the railroads, and steamers 
plying between all the great ports in the 
world have pretty much monopolized the 

[310] 



THE SEASHORE 

transportation on the deep seas. But 
the coast-dwellers still fish, and they still 
have the society of the ocean, and the 
Gloucester fleet at least still sails to the 
Newfoundland Banks, and a hardy popu- 
lation, quick of hand and eye, still lives 
by the salt water. 

But the great seaside industry of our 
day is the cultivation of the summer 
boarder. Deliberately, and in many cases 
reluctantly, the coast-dweller has come to 
regard him and his family as a fortuitous 
occurrence singularly adapted to yield 
the means of support. He provides for 
him at a price; sells him land when he 
insists, or rents him a cottage and sells 
him such of the necessaries of life as do 
not come in cans or bottles or paper boxes. 
The master of a clipper-ship that sailed 
out of Boston twenty-five years ago told 
me that he had been offered the command 
of a transatlantic liner, but had refused it 
because it was not to his taste to keep a 

[311]' 



THE SEASHORE 

hotel. It is not always to the coast- 
dweller's taste to conduct a summer home 
for people who live in towns, but he does 
it because it is the thing that has come to 
his hand to do, and because the seafar- 
ing occupations of his fathers have either 
passed away or diminished in variety 
and extent, or become less profitable 
than this shore business, which in the 
last fifty years has yearly pressed in in 
increased volume and demanded to be 
attended to. And so now when the great 
ports that the railroads run to have got 
pretty much all the shipping business, 
and mineral oil and gas and electricity 
light the world that once burned whale- 
oil, the pleasure of the ocean's invigora- 
ting and improving company has come 
to be the attraction that keeps the coast 
villages still prosperous, and fills the little 
harbours with little sails. 

Very improving company it is for folks 
who are harmonious with it. It does 

[312] 



THE SEASHORE 

good to some — to the young especially — 
by affording them occupation, and to 
others by enabling them to dispense with 
occupation. Women who have come to 
be aware of nerves, tired men who have 
worked hard, sit and look at the sea, 
watch distant sails of boats beating back 
and forth, keep tab on the tide, listen to 
the wash of the waves on the shore, or at 
other times to the gurgle of the water 
under the bows of a sail-boat. They 
take books down to the shore or out in 
boats, and don't read them, because the 
sea has better things to tell them than are 
in most of the books, and tells them bet- 
ter. And the sea-creatures are company 
for them — the periwinkles, the jellyfish, 
the starfish, the hermit-crabs, and all the 
other crabs, the oysters, the lobsters, and 
the unostentatious clams. A stretch of 
sand or mud that the tide plays over is 
more than a stretch of sand. It is a 
marine garden-patch, full of life, interest, 

[313] 



THE SEASHORE 

and even profit. The stunted, stubborn, 
wind-blown cedars that keep obstinate 
hold of the unstable soil their roots have 
grasped are more than stunted trees. 
They are arboreal soldiers, always in a 
fight for life, exemplars of the unending 
struggle for existence. One honours 
them for their experience. 

And where are there such stage-eflFects 
as the sea contributes to ? Have you 
sometimes seen sunrise on the water ? A 
score of mornings every summer — two- 
score maybe — it is worth getting up to 
watch, and of course that is saying a 
great deal. What magic the setting sun 
works we all know, and what unreal and 
surpassing wonders the moon can com- 
pass with the waves to help her. And 
where are there such smells as the sea- 
smells ? Even the bad ones are good, 
for they are salt and wholesome and full 
of flavour. Let us not disparage the frag- 
rance of a flower-garden, or of the wild 

[314] 



THE SEASHORE 

grape, or the locust blossom. Praise the 
Lord for those benefits, but praise Him 
even more heartily for the common, inex- 
haustible smell of salt water. History 
tells of the exultant cries of Xenophon's 
Greeks when, with all their weary para- 
sangs at last behind them, they faced the 
sea. To them it meant home, liberty, 
the end of perils and of tribulations. It 
may never mean quite all of that to us, 
but even to us it does speak of permanency 
and of freedom, and even in our eyes it is 
the one thing that always looks just as it 
used to look, that time does not dwarf, 
that fashion does not alter, and that never 
needs to be restored. 



[315] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

For the toilers of the sea there will 
be sea-shore labours that come as part 
of the day's work, but for us, whose 
workshops are on the dry land, the ideal 
occupation, when we escape from them 
to the sea-shore, will be to do nothing. 
That is an employment that, faithfully 
pursued in its due season, is richly pro- 
ductive of benefits, and it is one of the 
most appreciated merits of the seashore 
that it encourages and extenuates the do- 
nothing attitude, and by its charms and 
wiles and changes, and the shifting pano- 
rama of its spectacles, beguiles the do- 
nothing looker-on into wholesome forget- 
fulness of his own inactivity. The sea, 
being never idle itself, easily persuades its 
visitor that it is doing all that is necessary 
to be done, and that the only duty that 

[316] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

an observer need concern himself about is 
the easy one of visual inspection. If he 
has a mind to test the sea's temperature 
from time to time by dipping himself into 
it, that is well enough, and will tend to 
discipline his energies and lull them back 
into a receptive state; and if his mind, 
even at its idlest, insists upon working 
just a little, there are always the habits 
of the sea to be studied. That will not 
tire him, nor prejudice any of the bene- 
fits of his repose, for the sea's habits are 
enough like human habits to be interest- 
ing, and enough unlike them to be rest- 
ful and refreshing by contrast. 

Consider the punctuality of the tides. 
Human punctuality is apt to be more of 
a virtue than of a grace. It is com- 
patible with unlovely qualities, prone 
to self-assertion and severe expectation. 
There are saintly people who are punc- 
tual out of pure consideration for others, 
but the more prevalent sort of punctual 

[317] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

people like as little to be kept waiting 
as to be late themselves. The tides are 
irresistibly punctual, but with a redeem- 
ing idiosyncrasy. They are an hour late 
every day. They never come, they never 
go, until they get ready. Ships and 
bathers and boatmen and clam-diggers 
may wait for them or not, as they will. 
They care not. They wait for no man, 
nor ask any man to wait for them. And 
yet the tides are responsible and to be 
depended on. You can set a clock by 
them. The hands on their dial are the 
anchored sail-boats that swing around 
when the tide turns. And while they 
are responsible, they are not tiresomely 
exact. They conspire together with the 
winds and the moon, the signs of the 
zodiac, the seasons and the almanac- 
makers, and sweep in much farther and 
then out much farther some days than 
others. That is one of the details that 
make their habits so much more soothing 

[318] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

and inspiring than the habits of the man 
who turns the same corner at precisely 
thirteen minutes after eight every morn- 
ing. The punctual man of business is a 
nicely adjusted cog in a supplementary 
machine. The tides, too, are parts of a 
machine. They are great fly-wheels re- 
volving majestically in the power-house 
of the earth. Man's punctuality is a bit 
wearisome, though not nearly as weari- 
some as the lack of it; but the tides, 
splendidly subordinate to the mind that 
drives the universe, share and impart 
something of the majesty of that life- 
giving will. They are not tiresome, but 
restful. They soothe. They tell of law 
that is neither petty nor partial; of 
order tranquil in the sublimity of the 
might that directs it; of d'Csign executed 
without intervention of imperfect human 
tools. 

The sea is orderly, of course. What is 
ordered is orderly by natural conse- 

[319] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

quence, but the sea is orderly after its 
own fashion, not with overnice, pernick- 
ety methods, but on a large, indulgent 
scale that leaves a clean, decent beach 
most of the time. It makes no com- 
plaint of the shiftlessness of folks who 
leave things around where they shouldn't 
be left. Drop newspapers on the beach 
if you like, or banana-skins, clam-shells, 
almost anything except broken glass. It 
will be gone with the next tide, and no 
fuss made about it. Nothing will be 
left but a few shreds of clean seaweed, 
and may be a periwinkle's shell, with or 
without its tenant. Anything that will 
float will go, and there comes in the sea's 
power to discipline and train the shore 
people. Indulgent as it is in cleaning 
up after them and smoothing out their 
tracks and carrying off their rubbish, it 
gives them no whit of encouragement to 
be heedless or to impose on its good nat- 
ure. It is only their servant when they 

[3201 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

respect the terms of its service. Leave 
a boot loose within its reach, out it goes 
on the preoccupied tide, along with the 
newspapers and the banana-skins. In- 
difference to the sea will not do. Its 
regularities are to be respected; also its 
irregularities. It makes no scruple of 
having moods and fits of temper. For 
days together it is bland, soothing, accom- 
modating, serviceable. Then it yawns, 
is bored by being so long pleasant, 
rumples its hair, thrashes about, sweeps 
up and down the coast, looking for sail- 
boats to blow ashore, and like as not 
slams them on to the rocks. Varium et 
mutahile, and yet constant, too. Shore- 
dwellers are apt to be philosophers. 
What wonder, with such a companion 
and such a training! If the fisherman's 
wife is less kind to him one day than an- 
other, how can he have the face to 
grumble at it, he who lives in daily con- 
tact with a creature moodier than any 

[321] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

woman, and yet so grand a creature, with 
such depths, such powers, such irresisti- 
ble charms, such vast benevolences. The 
fisherman ought surely to accept it as 
part of the scheme of the universe that 
even a dinner-plate should now and then 
be thrown at his head. That is the way 
the sea treats him. He ought, an imper- 
turbable man, to dodge the plate and still 
be thankful for his dinner, and hope to 
get it more amiably served when the 
moon changes. 

But more likely he sulks. None of us 
treat one another with the large charity 
and composure we can command in the 
face of forces that compel it. We are 
prone to resent the whims of people who 
like us better one day than another. We 
don't remember how much better pleased 
with ourselves we are some days than 
others. If we find our own society edify- 
ing on Tuesday and are deadly tired out 
of it on Friday, why need it displease us 

[ 322 ] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

that others betray symptoms of the same 
variation of sentiment ? When the sea is 
unkind we make no moan about it. We 
know it will feel different presently. 

It is typical of the robust indifference 
of the sea to what we think of it that it 
leaves on its shores and beaches so many 
loose stones of sizes handy for us to hurl. 
Were you ever conscious of that horse- 
man's prejudice against rolling stones in 
the road which makes it repugnant to his 
conscience to leave a dangerous one un- 
lifted behind him ? He thinks of a pos- 
sible horse stumbling over it in the dark, 
maybe, and constrained by the responsi- 
bility which truly civilized beings feel 
for the decent maintenance of all the 
details of the apparatus of civilization, 
he stops and throws the dangerous stone 
out of the road. I have even known that 
habit of mind to compel a conscientious 
citizen to stop and scrape up broken glass 
out of the highway for fear that it would 

[ 323 ] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

harm the rubber tires of passing auto- 
mobiles; and that notwithstanding that 
to him automobiles were a nuisance and 
an oppression. 

An analogous carefulness helps to make 
us solicitous about our conduct, and chary 
with a civilized reluctance of leaving be- 
hind us on the great highway injurious 
words or actions, mean or greedy be- 
haviours, neglected chances to do our 
fellows friendly or helpful turns. Such 
things are stones in the road, likely to 
bother us if we pass that way again, liable 
even to be thrown at us. It is not mere 
selfishness which makes us wary of such 
leanings and thoughtful to leave behind 
us a clean path, unfurnished with missileSo 
It is a preference, intelligent and honour- 
able, even though it is prudent, for good 
living and a fair record. 

No such preference or scruple bothers 
the sea. It leaves stones of all handy 
and unhandy sizes sticking out of the 

[ 324 ] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

sand. It had as lief dig them out as 
bury them. You may hurl them back 
at it ever so angrily if you choose. It 
does not care. Hard words and disci- 
pline are nothing to it. Its reputation is 
nothing to it, for it is not civilized, but 
an untamable creature that does as it 
likes. 

It is untamable, good tempered or bad 
tempered as the mood strikes it, and 
quite indifferent about what may be the 
consequences of its fits of angry energy. 
In that respect it is happily unlike most 
of us who are liable to have our liberties 
restricted for atrocious misbehaviour, and 
are wont to use a decent caution about 
turning our tempers loose. And yet the 
sea's tempers and our own have some 
curious points in common. There is re- 
spectable authority for the theory that 
the tempers of the sea and a large pro- 
portion of the irritations of us human 
creatures have the same causes. They 

[325] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

are atmospheric. We all know about the 
rheumatic people whose bones ache and 
whose tempers creak for days before a 
storm. When the storm finally breaks, 
they limber up at once and feel better; 
but something in the preliminary airs — 
waves of ether, electrical disturbances, 
one cross-grained atmospheric influence 
or another — rasps their nerves and strains 
their powers of self-control. And it is 
observed that these preliminary distresses 
come oftentimes in weather that to the 
eye makes an excellent appearance. 
Fine-looking days may be full of crotch- 
ets and cross words, and rainy ones be 
temperamentally amiable. Moreover, we 
hear curious things nowadays about light 
and its effects on human creatures — that 
the short rays of it are full of mischiev- 
ous potentiality ; that sunlight — that great 
germicide— may kill out of us more germs 
than we can spare; that the different 
races and complexions of men are nicely 

[ 326 1 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

adjusted to certain allowances of sun- 
light, the blond races to the least, the 
yellow races to more, and the blacks to 
most of all. They warn us — the scien- 
tific gentlemen do — ^that when it happens, 
in the course of race migrations, that a 
race gets too far out of the zone to which 
it is adapted there will be the mischief 
to pay in the course of time with that 
race. Black people and blond, we are 
told, cannot flourish and develop equally 
well in the same zone. Observation of 
the habits of the sea makes our minds 
more credulous of such assurances. The 
sea, to be sure, can stand all climates, is 
left out in all weathers, endures all at- 
mospheric fluctuations, all kinds of sun- 
light, short rays and blistering heat, and 
still survives. Survives! Yes, but with 
what vicissitudes of temper and be- 
haviour! When we remember that the 
unseen and unmeasured forces that keep 
the ocean moving, and stir it up to ob- 

[327] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

streperous demonstrations, are working 
all the time on us too, we get a little bet- 
ter idea of how the perpetual alchemy 
of nature works upon mankind. 

And what did they say to us only 
lately, after the raging of Vesuvius had 
been followed by the earthquake that 
dealt with San Francisco as no great 
city had been dealt with for centuries? 
*' Sun-spots!" they said to us, and ex- 
plained that for many months the sun 
had been far more than usually blotched, 
and had been training fearsome batteries 
of electrical artillery in our direction. 
These electrical missiles had penetrated 
to the hot interior of the orb whose sur- 
face we embellish, and made it hotter, 
and its swellings and subsequent con- 
tractions had made mischief on the lines 
of the great faults in the terrestrial crust, 
giving Naples the horrors, and by the aid 
of fire wiping most of the material part of 
San Francisco out of existence. And 

[ 328 ] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

what of the effect of these disastrous 
celestial intermeddlings upon the sea and 
upon mankind ? The winter record of 
the sea had been disastrous and destruc- 
tive far beyond common. A huge per- 
centage of the sailing-vessels had had to 
have new topmasts, and the marine-insur- 
ance companies were low-spirited about 
their losses. And was there a coincident 
distraction in the minds of men ? Well, 
was there not ? The spirit of unrest in 
our country was matter of constant re- 
mark. Here in America, in Europe, in 
Asia the old order has been shaken by 
assaults, in some cases violently changed, 
in many cases seriously threatened. A 
celestial disturbance, a combative sea, 
restless men, agitation of the nations — 
they have all come together. Maybe 
there was more in the venerable science 
of astrology than we incredulous mod- 
erns suspect. If the sea has not like 
passions with ours, at least its emotions 

[329] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

may possibly be traced to the same re- 
mote celestial causes as some of ours. 

No doubt consideration of the impul- 
siveness of the sea may lawfully breed 
in us increased respect for such a meas- 
ure of self-control as men have attained. 
We do behave ourselves, after a fashion, 
even when there is an exasperating sur- 
plus of short rays in the sunlight. We do 
not run amuck, even though our own 
rheumatic bones ache and our sciatical 
neighbour has jumping pains. That is 
because we are sentient creatures, and 
the sea is not. We are worked upon by 
all the strains and stimulants that coerce 
the sea, but though we are affected we 
are not quite coerced. There is a coun- 
ter-force inside of us. We think. The 
sea, in spite of its idiosyncrasies, is the 
greatest tool in the world; the better tool 
because it is unintelligent. The power to 
think makes creatures more efficient, but 
after they have learned to think, you have 

[330] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

to let them think. A certain proportion 
of them are bound to want to think for 
themselves and act accordingly, and im- 
mediately that happens their usefulness 
as tools is impaired, in spite of the de- 
velopment of their efficiency. The first- 
fruit of independent thought is tumult. 
The later fruit, in favourable instances, 
is civilization. The process of develop- 
ing men from the condition of tools to 
the condition of thinking units is per- 
petually going on in the world, with in- 
evitable resulting disturbance. The great 
wholesale example of it just now is Rus- 
sia, but all over the globe the same proc- 
ess is on exhibition in its various stages. 
An appalling job it is, the most consol- 
ing thought about it being that it seems 
to be the chief end of mundane existence; 
the work to which humanity is geared, 
and to the gradual accomplishment of 
which it is constrained, willing or unwill- 
ing, to bend whatever strength it has. 

[331] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

Let us be thankful that we have not 
got to send the sea to school and teach it 
to think. The sense of restfulness it 
gives us, as we contemplate it, comes a 
good deal, I suspect, from our feeling 
that here is one powerful and active creat- 
ure that we have not got to train. It 
will take care of itself, and we can take 
care of ourselves and not bother about 
it. It will never want to vote, never 
blame us for misrule, never shame us 
with evidences of our selfishness and 
neglect. Restless as it is, turbulent and 
untamable, it is a comfortable neigh- 
bour, as neighbours go. Really, is there 
anything else on the earth that takes care 
of itself.^ The mountains have forest 
fires and need land-laws and game-laws. 
The very air may be polluted with smoke 
and smells, the cataracts are water-power 
and can be stolen, the forests are mer- 
chandise, the plains are real estate; but 
the sea is not property, not perishable, 

[332] 



THE HABITS OF THE SEA 

not damageable. It is the one thing that 
balks greed and laughs at abuse ; the one 
thing whereof there is enough to go 
around, and in which no successful effort 
need be feared to claim a monopoly. 



[333] 



DEAFNESS 

"I AM going to ask you," writes a 
stranger to a deaf man, "to help me 
learn how to go on living notwithstanding 
I am deaf. How do you do it ? Is it 
that somehow you have learned to take 
the thing merely as an inconvenience and 
not as a curse? Surely if there is any 
secret about it, you won't mind telling 
me!" 

Surely not, surely not; but there is no 
secret. Deafness incontestably is a bad 
job, and has its trials, especially for be- 
ginners. There is no denying or getting 
around the inconveniences of it, but still 
it ought not to be rated as a curse. It is 
only a curse to persons who knock under 
to it. To be deaf is to be partly dead, and 
to be even partly dead is a very grave 
inconvenience to folks whose errand is 

[334] 



DEAFNESS 

still to be run in this world and among 
the living. But one should by all means 
make inconveniences keep bounds and 
order. Govern them, restrict them, con- 
strain them to docility and reasonable 
dimensions. Get service out of them 
even if that is possible. Don't let them 
sit in the saddle and hold the reins. A 
man may not go creditably through life 
asking odds of creation. The attitude of 
one who does that is the attitude for a 
deaf man to avoid. It should be his look- 
out that the inevitable inconveniences of 
his infirmity should fall as much as pos- 
sible on himself and as little as possible on 
others. That is not heroism, nor even 
pride; it is sound policy. His affair, if 
he is to go about in the world, is to be as 
little of a kill- joy and as much of an ac- 
quisition as possible, to keep himself so 
balanced and so restricted, to show such 
aplomb and such consideration that his 
presence will cause no fairly well-man- 

[335] 



DEAFNESS 

nered person discomfort or embarrass- 
ment. His part in the play may prove 
somewhat deficient in spoken lines and 
somewhat over-supplied with silent wait- 
ing, but there are fair possibilities of sat- 
isfaction in it provided it is acted out for 
all it is worth. 

After all, the saddest thing that can 
happen to a man is to carry no burden. 
To be bent under too great a load is bad; 
to be crushed by it is lamentable, but 
even in that there are possibilities that are 
glorious. But to carry no load at all — 
there is nothing in that. No one seems 
to arrive at any goal really worth reaching 
in this world who does not come to it 
heavy laden. The trouble with deafness 
is not so much that it is burdensome as 
that it seems such an unprofitable load. 
The weight that is strapped to the jockey's 
saddle is there for no more useful purpose 
than to make the race harder for the 
horse. That is pretty much how it is 

[336] 



DEAFNESS 

with deafness. It makes the race that 
much harder for the man. But sport is 
still sport. The race is still a race. Our 
handicaps are not of our own choosing. 
It is for us to go on with them and see 
that they don't slacken our speed or 
shorten our distance any whit more than 
they must. 

It is not wholly a deaf person's disad- 
vantage that many forms of amusement 
have slight attractions for him. Pro- 
vided he can get the amount of recreation 
that is necessary for his health, it does not 
greatly matter where he finds it. Any 
kind of game or sport that takes him into 
society and keeps him in sight of his fel- 
lows, and in touch with them even to a 
limited degree, is better than amuse- 
ments that are solitary. If he plays soli- 
taire let him play it in company, in sight 
at least of other human creatures. There 
is a constant force that drives him to se- 
clusion, but to be a recluse is unwhole- 

[337] 



DEAFNESS 

some. Seclusion tends to warp the spirit. 
A deaf man's policy is to keep his spirit 
as straight and supple as he can, and not 
to let bodily infirmity twist it out of 
shape. With one sense impaired he has 
four left, and there is a lo^^ left in life 
to a man who has four senses in good 
order and perhaps partial use of the fifth. 
There is the smell faculty. Besides being 
useful and protective it is at times con- 
siderably cheering. The smell of the 
country in the spring, the smell of the 
land after a summer shower, the smell of 
the woods in the fall gratefully excite 
and inspire the spirit. The smell of 
flowers and of salt water are very good. 
All the good natural smells help the deaf 
man to keep himself in conceit with 
Earth, though they don't make up to him 
for the loss of the sounds of nature, the 
singing of birds, the wind in the trees, the 
wash of the waves on the sea-shore. Smell 
is least among the senses, but it is an 

[3381 



DEAFNESS 

asset worth considering when one's proper 
total of assets is impaired. 

Sight means almost the difference be- 
tween helplessness and power. It means 
reading, work, the capacity to make one's 
living and to feed one's mind. One would 
say it meant everything were there not 
cases where life has been made profitable 
without either hearing or sight. It is the 
mind, and not any sense or senses, that is 
everything. 

As for taste, it means that even a deaf 
man may take pleasure in his meals, and 
that is important, for meals are of such 
constant and frequent recurrence that it 
must be a serious misfortune not to find 
some pleasure in mere food. The sense 
of feeling is of course a good asset, though 
deaf people don't develop it in the degree 
that some blind people do. And there is 
sleep. Deaf people who are lucky enough 
not to have noises in their heads have an 
advantage as sleepers, and commonly 

[339] 



DEAFNESS 

profit by it, and a good sleeper has a third 
of all his time profitably disposed of. 

Now the advantage of deafness, in so 
far as a detrimental thing can have an 
advantage, is that it favours concentra- 
tion. The mind keeps going all the 
time, and provided it is directed by a 
strong enough will and supported by a 
sound enough body there may be a cer- 
tain profit in that freedom from interrup- 
tion which it gains by working in a silent 
world. They say that Mr. Thomas Edi- 
son, the inventor, is pretty deaf and minds 
it very little. If that is true it must be 
because his mind is constantly working to 
some definite purpose. Presumably it is 
never left to prey upon itself. It never 
rides. It is always driven and driven 
pretty hard. Of course it is an excep- 
tional mind. But still the great prob- 
lem for any deaf man is to govern what 
mind he has, and keep it as busy as pos- 
sible in the most profitable employment 

[340] 



DEAFNESS 

it is fit for. If he can tire it out every 
day to fairly good purpose it won't tire 
him out by idle and harassing reflections. 
Work is the great palliation of his infirm- 
ity, and his work has got to be of a rather 
exceptional sort, for deafness shuts him 
off from very many of the ordinary occu- 
pations. Persons whose deafness comes 
to them so early in life as to determine 
their choice of work have a great advan- 
tage over those who follow a calling in 
which hearing is essential. That was one 
trouble with Beethoven. He had risked 
all he had in music. When his deafness 
came it brought inaction and despair. 

But for most persons perpetual work in 
waking hours doesn't do, and the deaf 
man who tries it is apt to come to grief. 
His nerves wear out, he grows sad and 
irritable, his powers of mind sag, and he 
tends to become a grief to himself and 
bad company for even the kindest of his 
fellows. He must have some little fun 

[ 341 1 



DEAFNESS 

every day, and some human society, if he 
is to get on as well as he ought. Lucky 
indeed for him if he has folks about 
him, folks who take trouble for him, sup- 
plement him, eat with him, talk with him, 
who share indeed the weight of his in- 
firmity, from whom he does ask odds, but 
gives service back and gratitude, and 
trusts finally to love to make all odds 
even. Some human company is almost 
indispensable, but not too much, for a 
considerable measure of solitude is rest- 
ful to a deaf man and good for him. 
Reading must be his greatest recreation. 
That takes him out of his environment 
and out of himself and gives him new 
thoughts, but he also needs, even more 
than hearing people, the solace of domes- 
tic life. Babies are good company for 
him, for they rarely say anything that is 
essential to hear. Games are good for 
him — ^golf , billiards, cards, any game that 
is distracting and recreative, and keeps 

[342] 



DEAFNESS 

him in touch, however imperfectly, with 
human beings. He will do well, she will 
do especially well to take due interest in 
personal appearance. Hearing people 
take a vast interest in clothes. Deaf 
people may deck themselves out with 
even more propriety, for inasmuch as their 
social performance is bound to be defec- 
tive, it behooves them to make their 
social appearance as attractive as they 
may. 

The ingenuity of man has contrived a 
variety of instruments by the use of 
which deaf people may hear better. 
There are hearing-horns, great and small ; 
fan-shaped things by which an attentive 
mind can gather sounds through the 
teeth; tubes through which persons not 
deaf to an egregious excess may get the 
conversation of a single person with cer- 
tainty and ease. They are all unsightly, 
inconvenient, and objectionable, but any 
of them that really helps hearing is far 

[343] 



DEAFNESS 

better than unmitigated deafness. Hear- 
ing persons, as a rule, don't like to talk 
loud. Many of them can't talk loud — 
their voices don't carry. Moreover, loud 
talking is a nuisance in company, rasps 
throats and nerves, and curries most of 
the bloom off the conversational peach. 
It pays a deaf person, who is deaf enough, 
to use any hearing-instrument that will 
help him. The fact that he has it and 
hangs it out is itself very useful, because 
it advertises his infirmity. If one is deaf 
it is far better to be known to be deaf, 
for a recognized defect in hearing excites 
much less prejudice than a suspected 
defect in sense. There is a sufficient 
number of people who can talk into tubes 
so as to be heard, and without embarrass- 
ment, and can say good things. These 
persons are the salt of the deaf man's 
earth; so much so that he is in danger of 
cultivating their society with too much 
zeal. He runs to intimacies. That is a 

[344] 



DEAFNESS 

natural result of his condition. Affec- 
tion makes an atmosphere that is restful 
and healing. Everyone profits by such 
an atmosphere, but deaf people es- 
pecially, because they are more sub- 
ject to irritation than the common run 
of people who hear better. A lot of 
things tend to make them cross. What 
we hear, provided we hear normally, con- 
stantly qualifies the conclusions that we 
base on the testimony of our eyes alone. 
To see disputes and not know the rights 
of them, and to have to sit passive with- 
out taking a hand, is irritating; to get 
angry and use bad words which are based 
on misapprehension and are not justified 
is mortifying; to see the pool troubled 
and not be able to get in is trying to the 
philosophy. But philosophy should be 
the deaf man's strong point. He should 
be absolutely good-humoured — as no deaf 
man ever is — and absolutely patient and 
resolute in refusing to be irritated by any- 

[345] 



DEAFNESS 

thing he can't help. Finding himself de- 
fective in all these important require- 
ments he must still aspire and endeavour 
daily toward a better command of them. 
He ought to be pious-minded. There 
is nothing in deafness that can hinder 
him from knowing just as much about his 
Maker as anyone else does, or from profit- 
ing as fully as anyone else by his knowl- 
edge. There are people — a good many 
of them — from whose minds the thought 
of God, the sense of His presence, His 
power. His will, is seldom absent. There 
is solace, strength, and companionship in 
that condition. I would not have a deaf 
man sit down under the conclusion that 
it is God's will that he should be deaf, 
for I doubt if it is; but he may assure 
himself that his deafness accords some- 
how with God's justice, and that it is 
God's will that, being deaf, he should 
make the best of it, and should still be 
sane and sweet and stout-hearted. There 

[3461 



DEAFNESS 

are lots of bunkers in the big links of life. 
Deafness is only one of them and is far 
from being the worst. It is for theolo- 
gians to settle who put them there, and 
we may guess, if we like, that it was the 
Adversary. But we all agree — theolo- 
gians and everyone — that, being in a 
bunker, one's duty is to work out. 

A deaf man who really wants to be 
good has it in his favour that there are a 
number of sinful or inexpedient things 
that he cannot do to advantage. Politics 
is full of dangerous solicitations, but he 
can hardly be a leader in politics, so he 
is quit of most of the risks of it. He can- 
not play poker to good advantage, though 
he can buy stocks ; he cannot flirt, unless, 
indeed, he is a resolute adventurer and 
learns to read the lips; he is so badly 
handicapped in general society that there 
is little chance that his head will be 
turned by social success, or his energies 
wasted in a chase after it. He has even 

[ 347 ] 



DEAFNESS 

a greater incentive to be temperate than 
most men have, for carousals are dull 
sport to a deaf man. To be sure, pecula- 
tion and avarice are open to him, and 
perhaps avarice is as good a sin as he can 
take up with if he must cultivate any, 
for a decent share of riches may help his 
case a good deal, and it is interesting to 
hoard and make heirs respectful. But it 
is unwise of him to be much of a sinner, 
because he is so much exposed to his own 
society and will be so much inconven- 
ienced by having to associate with an un- 
worthy person whom he cannot respect. 
He had better be good. He may be vir- 
tuous and still not happy — whatever the 
copybooks declare — but certainly, being 
deaf, he has a great deal better chance to 
be happy by sticking close to virtue than 
by trying to be successfully wicked. 



[348] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

"There are losses, of course, about a 
detached condition such as our club 
fosters. We are out of the running for 
what the world calls its great prizes. 
Nevertheless, there are great compensa- 
tions. The philosophic calm of an atmos- 
phere where the worst has happened is 
wonderfully favourable to dispassionate 
observation and reflection. Interests in 
our club project to an unusual extent be- 
yond the material concerns of life and its 
e very-day business. The indifference to 
money is remarkable. To have enough 
is, of course, desirable, and no one spares 
effort to achieve that, but there is great 
brotherliness in our little community; 
almost a common purse, dipped into 
often to help families. None of us being 

[ 349 ] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

in society, none of us have urgent use for 
more money than the modest comforts of 
our existence call for; and all of us 
dread, usually out of our experience, the 
pinches and temptations of extravagance. 
It has impressed me to learn what inter- 
ests are still possible in life shut off from 
the usual social incentives and aspira- 
tions, but the truth is that life itself is an 
enormously interesting condition, espe- 
cially when you are so placed that you 
can see it with a proper perspective. 
The management of the great universe, 
the march of science and the steady 
growth of knowledge, the immense mass 
of knowledge not yet attained, the fate of 
the nations and the fluctuating move- 
ment of masses of people toward wiser 
living, and larger liberty, and then the 
great beyond with its strange, nebulous 
possibilities, but not a whit more strange 
than the realities we know — life never can 
be dull while the mind keeps its powers 

[350] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

and has these boundless fields in which to 
-test them. 

"But our great good fortune is that we 
have the Httle invaluable things that make 
for serenity and health of mind; fellow- 
ship and human society; plenty to ob- 
serve, plenty to do, chances to be useful, 
time to read and time to think and fit 
minds to swap thoughts with. And we 
have curious points of contact with the 
great outside world, and our club's ex- 
clusiveness might be modified if we chose. 
But we do not choose, and were never less 
disposed to than now, when our list of 
eligibles to be considered is a good deal 
longer than usual, and when there are 
such curious possibilities of its further 
extension. 

"But, as I was saying, I can best do 
my errand by giving you such an under- 
standing of the club that you can judge 
whether or not you care to join it, by tell- 
ing you how I came to join it myself. 

[351] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

'*I don't know that you remember. 
There are so many such cases in the news- 
papers, besides ten times as many that 
never get out. But, after all, what do 
you care about it, and why should I be 
at pains to record an expiated oflFence! 
It is indelicate as well as unprofitable to 
intrude such matters upon notice. Con- 
fession at the proper time, and when con- 
science, or even necessity, compels it, 
eases the soul, but the habit of expound- 
ing one's past deliquencies neither helps 
the soul nor makes for self-respect. Let 
the sore heal if it will. At any rate, 
healed or open, keep it out of sight. 

"One day I came out of the great gate, 
and turned and looked up and saw the 
tront of Copper John, the back of whose 
regimentals I had looked upon morning, 
noon, and night for so many weary 
months. There was no one at the gate 
to meet me, but that was because I pre- 
ferred it to be so. A train rolled in from 

[352] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

the West as I stood there. With my 
ticket to New York already in my pocket 
I crossed the street and boarded it. On 
it rolled again out of the queer old covered 
station, and from the car window I got a 
last glimpse of the long, high walls, the 
barred windows and the grim mass of 
gray buildings that had been my habita- 
tion. 

"Cousin John met me at the station in 
New York (we had arranged that) and 
took me home in a cab. Aunt Cecilia 
looked me over with a grave, kind, ques- 
tioning scrutiny, but with hardly a word, 
until presently her eyes filled and she put 
her arms around my neck and kissed me. 
Then she held my hand while we talked. 
Dear soul, it was evident that she had 
wondered what sort of a creature was 
coming back. A human creature still, 
she seemed to find, and then she left no 
barriers up, but was ready, so far as lay 
in her, to go on as in days past. Of 

[353] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

course that was grateful to my spirit, but 
still not very unexpected, for I knew the 
lines on which Aunt Cecilia was built. 
But I also knew the situation and had no 
delusions as to my future place in the 
world or the need that my orbit should 
not cut her's too often. 

*' John gave me a thin packet of letters. 
They were from a few old friends, and, of 
course, they were kind, for no one would 
write unkind letters to such a man as I at 
such a time. One offered me employ- 
ment. The truth is there were one or 
two extenuating circumstances about my 
predicament of which one or two persons 
knew. I had been justly enough dealt 
with, so far as the law went, but it was a 
very tangled web that I got caught in, and 
it had not caught me alone. Half a 
dozen of us were mixed up in an intricate 
game of businefss. It went wrong and we 
made desperate efforts to save it. Either 
our judgments became impaired, or we 

[354] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

were ill advised, for taking business neces- 
sity as our first law and trying to do what 
was * necessary,' it came about that we 
overstepped the faint line that runs tor- 
tuously between what is lawful business 
and what is a statutory crime, and I, as I 
say, was caught. By going on the witness 
stand I could not indeed have cleared 
myself, but I could have mitigated my 
situation, and commended myself to the 
favour of the Court. The whole story did 
not come out in the evidence. What con- 
cerned me was true, but what concerned 
others was also true, and with the help of 
my testimony it could have been proved. 
The prosecuting officer knew it, and, of 
course, he tried to get from me the testi- 
mony he wanted. Justice would be 
helped, he pointed out, if I took the stand, 
and my own sentence would be modified 
and perhaps suspended. But I could not 
feel that in this particular case the ends 
of justice were ends that it was coercively 

[3551 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

incumbent upon me to promote. If I 
held my tongue, justice would at least 
fare better than I should, for she would 
get me anyhow. And if I testified, men 
no worse than I, my own familiars, would 
sink into the pitch that already held 
me. 

"I could not do that. It was out of the 
question. It was dishonour offered blunt 
end to. It is only the thin end — so thin 
as hardly to be recognized for what it is — 
that is dangerous to a man of decent in- 
stincts. Sitting among the fragments of a 
shattered reputation, it was still consoling 
to me to believe that men no better than 
I were perhaps worth shielding. Any- 
how, I held my tongue, and the worthy 
district attorney, somewhat disconcerted, 
had to make the best of it. My reticence 
cost me a good many additional months 
of confinement, but it helped very much 
to make my own company tolerable to me. 
And that was important, for though there 

[3561 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

was plenty of good enough company up 
there, the customs of the place made any 
sort of selection difficult. 

*'Of several men who were affected by 
the reticence I have mentioned, one had 
prospered so remarkably in boom times, 
and grown so very rich, that it would 
never have done at all for him to show 
any sign that he realized an obligation to 
me. From his point of view, it would 
have been to invite blackmail, and pros- 
perity had doubtless made him timid. I 
presume he expected to hear from me, 
and perhaps he is still waiting and still 
apprehensive. The others, too, were 
naturally disposed to await developments 
— all but Charley Carstairs. One of my 
letters was from him. 'Dear Tom,' he 
had written, * by my calculations it is most 
time you came back. I have been sav- 
ing a job for you here. When you are 
ready, come and see me about it.' The 
address he gave was near the North 

[357] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

River, between Washington and Union 
squares. 

"Another note read: 'Mr. Thomas 
Patterson may get information of inter- 
est, and to his probable advantage, by 
calling at No. 39 Jefferson Place at five 
o'clock on Friday afternoon, and asking 
for Theodore Hazelton.' 

"The next day I went over to see Car- 
stairs. In so far as concerned his rela- 
tions with me, I found him exactly where 
I had left him, except that his old regard 
for me seemed to be stimulated by a sense 
of obligation. He had been prospered 
and had a good business. He showed me 
a desk which he said was to be mine; 
told me something of the work that was 
to be done at it, and named a salary com- 
fortably sufficient for my maintenance as 
a single man. 'I need you here, Tom,' 
he said. *You will be worth to me all I 
pay you, and there will be chances pres- 
ently for you to make more money. You 

[3581 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

have had troubles enough, and you will 
have vexations enough in life, without 
being harassed by poverty.' 

"Carstairs' offices looked out on the 
water-front. I liked that. The region 
was unfamiliar to me and remote from 
Wall Street, so that I would not be con- 
stantly testing the memories of old ac- 
quaintances, and that was an advantage. 
I determined to find rooms over in that 
part of the town, and live as well as work 
there. 

"'The next day was Friday. I had er- 
rands to do, and did them, for to tell the 
truth my garb was out of fashion. But in 
due time I went to find No. 39 Jefferson 
Place. I had not recognized the number, 
but when I came to the place I knew it 
well. It is one of the oddest, quietest, and 
most unobtrusive eating-places in New 
York, with an old, dingy, seasoned bar- 
room restaurant on the ground floor. No 
one was in it at that hour except the bar- 

[359] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

keeper. I asked for Mr. Hazelton, sat 
down and lighted a cigarette. Presently 
a gentleman came in, spoke to the bar- 
keeper, and then came over, said he was 
Mr. Hazelton, and shook hands with me. 
*I am going to have a cup of tea,' he said. 
' Will you join me in that, or will you have 
a drink .^' 

"I said tea. The barkeeper ordered it. 

''Mr. Hazelton seemed about fifty-five 
years old, a good-looking, well-dressed 
man with a clean-shaven face and a good 
colour. I regarded him with much in- 
terest, for I had speculated a good deal 
on what sort of person it would be that 
wanted to make an appointment with a 
man newly come to town from the place I 
had left. I could not imagine his busi- 
ness with me, and I was prepared to see 
anything from a bunco-steerer to a parson. 
He was much more like a parson than a 
bunco-steerer, and yet he wasn't a parson. 
But he was a thoroughly reputable-look- 

[360] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

ing man, with a certain blithe quality 
about him; a man fit to pass the plate at 
old Trinity, and with an engaging address. 

''*You are much better knowTi to me,' 
he said, 'than I to you. I have been 
deputized to invite you to join the Quon- 
dam Club.' 

"'To join a club.^' said I. 'Invite me 
to join a club ? Are you quite sure you 
have got the right man ? ' 

"'Quite sure,' said he. 'You will find 
agreeable social relations somewhat difii- 
cult to cultivate if you settle down again, 
as I presume you will, in New York. It 
has been thought that the Quondam Club 
would be useful to you, and that you 
would be an acceptable member of it.' 

"'You surprise me very much,' said I. 
'I never heard of such a club, and, of 
course, I had counted all clubs as things 
past for me. Please tell me more about it.' 

'"Its purpose is to enable certain fit 
men who, for one reason or another, pre- 

[361] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

fer to live a little apart from the world, to 
command some of the reasonable and 
sober pleasures that help to make life 
worth living. Now, Mr. Patterson, tell 
me: Whom do you expect to associate 
with in these coming years in this town ? ' 

''The tea was brought, and he poured 
it out. 

"'I see,' said I, 'that you have met, and 
perhaps solved, a problem which I recog- 
nize. But for me it is still a problem. I 
don't expect to have associates, except 
chance ones from day to day, and a very 
few old friends.' 

*"I think you will find it very advan- 
tageous and helpful to have some place 
where you will stand absolutely on an 
equality with the men you meet.' 

"*No doubt, if I meet the right sort of 
men.' 

" ' You will meet them, I think. At any 
rate, I shall try to persuade you to make 
the experiment.' 

[362] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

" I lit another cigarette. 

"'Mr. Hazelton,' said I, 'I would like 
to know more of the Quondam Club.' 

"'Dine with me there on Sunday night, 
then.' 

"I said I would, and he gave me an 
address. 

"Thither I went at dusk on Sunday 
evening and found a big, old-fashioned 
house on a corner, on one of the lower 
squares of the city. It was early spring 
and the trees in the square were just begin- 
ning to put out leaves. The grass was 
already green. The clock in a church 
tower struck seven as I went up the steps. 
The square is on the borderland of gen- 
tility. On one side of it are fine old 
dwellings in which still dwell people of 
fortune and quality. But running back 
from the other side of it is a great net- 
work of streets where poorer people live 
in small houses and tenements; a popu- 
lation which uses the square as its park. 

[363] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

"A negro servant let me in. Asking 
for Mr. Hazelton, I stopped at the coat- 
room and left my overcoat. My feelings 
were very mixed. During the period 
when I could not choose my company I 
had, as far as I could, abdicated all 
volition, taking whatever, and whoever, 
came with controlled submission. I had 
aimed not to be a man at all, but an in- 
telligent, orderly automaton, who should 
go through the prescribed motions of 
living in such a fashion as to avoid every 
particle of unnecessary friction. But 
now, with my course of life again restored 
to the domination of my own will, it was 
different. I could live alone if need be, 
and was fully prepared to do so, but I 
had no mind to ally myself with any 
coterie of scamps, or characterless casta- 
ways, or human refuse of any sort. I 
squirmed mentally at the idea of fellow- 
ship with a company of unknown persons 
whose quality my imagination utterly re- 

[364] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

fused to conjecture, and about whom I 
could only guess that every man of them 
probably was under some distinct social 
disability. Even then I could have run 
away, but running away was never my 
strong point, and if it had been, my recent 
training would have discouraged it. 

"The house tended to reassure me. 
There was distinction about it. It was a 
dignified house, excellently kept, not with- 
out elegance and with an atmosphere of 
repose. Hazelton came out and brought 
me into a large reception room. We 
stood before a wood fire and I looked 
about. The back room looked out on a 
little court where I could see the tops of 
green things starting. In that room, 
which was also large, the newspapers lay 
on a long table, and half a dozen men 
were reading them or talking. I could 
only think of them that in their outward 
aspects they were such men as one sees 
in clubs, and that they were grouped in 

[365] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

a way that suggested the familiar inter- 
course that belongs to small clubs where 
everyone knows everyone else. 

"Hazelton said our dinner was ready 
and we went upstiars. There was a 
library pleasantly lighted, its walls lined 
with books that overflowed into shelves in 
the hall and in other rooms. The dining- 
room had a long table where some men 
were already dining, and other smaller 
tables near the windows, by one of which 
we took our seats. It is enough to say 
that the dinner was good as to meat and 
drink and service, and that Hazelton was 
highly agreeable, talking about matters 
suggested by the news in the day's papers, 
giving evidence of a mind exceedingly well 
informed about many things, and of an 
excellent gift of expounding his knowl- 
edge and his reflections in terse and lucid 
and amusing comment. I wondered who 
he was and what he did, and of course I 
wondered also what he had done, but I 

[ 366 ] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

asked no personal questions. It fell out 
presently in the course of talk that he 
was a writer for newspapers. As I said, 
he was highly agreeable, and the stimu- 
lating contact of his active mind set my 
own wits to working more vivaciously than 
had been their wont for many a day, and 
suddenly it came to me, as I stirred the 
black coffee and lighted my cigar, that I 
was in good company again, and that the 
Quondam Club seemed to be a pleasant 
place. 

"Some one touched my shoulder, and I 
looked up at a man who said, ' How do you 
do!' and held out his hand to me. 

"'Patterson,' said Hazelton, 'I beg to 
make known to you Mr. Walter Herrick, 
the president of the club.' 

"Hazelton pulled up a chair, and Mr. 
Herrick sat down with us. He was a man 
of sixty-five or thereabouts, his hair and 
mustache almost white. He was tall 
and rather thin. His face, grave in re- 

[367] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

pose, had lines in it that told of a will 
which had written its record where the 
experienced eye could read it. It was a 
kind face and noticeably serene ; it lighted 
up when he smiled like a window struck 
by a sunbeam, but when the smile died 
out the impression that was left was of 
gentleness, austerity, fortitude. He in- 
spired confidence. Unmistakably, to my 
mind, he was a good man. My own re- 
cent tranquillity was due in great measure 
to a good dinner and entertaining com- 
pany, but his serenity seemed to have a 
deeper, a spiritual, basis. There flashed 
through my mind as I looked at him: 

Integer vitce, scelerisque purus. 

'*At once my misgivings about the 
Quondam Club dispersed. More than 
by the polished brass bell-button, the 
mahogany doors, the decorum of the ser- 
vants, the general decency of the place — 
more even than by Hazelton's amenities 

[368] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

and courtesies, I was reassured by the 
president's face. If the club was good 
enough for him it was good enough for 
me. I was sure of it. 

"Almost immediately Hazelton excused 
himself, and Mr. Herrick and I sat down 
with our cigars in another room. 

"*Mr. Patterson,' he said, 'all men are 
sinners in various degrees. All of us 
break some of the laws of God, and surely 
suffer for it. Many of us break, first or 
last, some of the stated laws of men. Of 
those who do that, some are caught and 
some are not. Of those who are caught, 
some are punished and some are not. Of 
those who are punished, some profit by 
hard discipline and grow better; others 
grow worse and become criminals. 
Man's justice is exceedingly imperfect. 
There are always many rogues and 
scoundrels out of jail, and there are always 
some good men in jail. There are always 
heroic souls struggling upward against 

[369] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

heavy odds, and there are clever rascals 
and merciless brutes who live in ease and 
honour by the superiority of their wits. 
This club was founded by a sinner who 
was not found out. He was a man of 
high standing and large affairs. At a 
critical moment, when threatened with 
insolvency for lack of ready money, he 
used trust funds in his possession to a 
large extent to tide over his difficulties. 
His concerns did not improve imme- 
diately and he was brought to the very 
verge of exposure and ruin. But in the 
very nick of time matters mended for him. 
The tide turned; he recouped his losses, 
paid back the stolen funds, and saved also 
his own considerable fortune. The world 
never knew of his temptation, nor of his 
fall, but he knew, and he never forgot. 
The memory of what he had done and 
of the ignominy he had escaped he never 
suffered himself to put aside. It became 
to him like the hair-shirt that an old-time 

[ 370 ] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

penitent was used to wear next to his skin, 
with fine linen over it. He had learned 
that reputation and character are not 
identical; that reputation may survive 
long after character has become vitiated, 
and that character may survive after 
reputation has been blasted. For years 
he went about doing good openly, but still 
more in secret. To raise up the fallen 
and to succour the tempted were his con- 
solations, and he came to have intimate 
knowledge of many people and conditions 
of existence that the great world knows 
very little about. And one thing that he 
did was to found this club. He observed 
that men of education and refinement — 
men of his own sort — who had suffered 
some overwhelming misfortune or dis- 
grace, and who for that, or any other rea- 
son, had slipped out of their natural place 
in society and were constrained to live 
alone, best found the sort of solitude they 
needed in great cities, and especially in 

[371] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

New York. Such men he came across 
from time to time, and to some of them 
he was greatly drawn. Between some of 
these he became a connecting-Hnk, bring- 
ing them together to their comfort and 
advantage. Finally be bought and fur- 
nished a house, put it in charge of five 
such men in whose discretion and integ- 
rity he had confidence, directed them to 
admit to its hospitalities such others as 
from time to time they might find fit, and 
made himself responsible for a moderate 
annual sum for its maintenance. That 
was the beginning of this club. The 
scheme worked. The administration of 
it being in wise hands, a club grew up 
which in a few years had twenty members. 
Before the founder died he deeded the 
house to the club's trustees, and also made 
over to them a sum of money sufficient to 
produce the annual income which he had 
been used to furnish, and which, though 
no longer absolutely requisite for the 

[3721 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

club's maintenance, was found to be ad- 
vantageous, especially in enabling the 
committee to extend its hospitalities.' 

"Mr. Herrick got up and took a mo- 
rocco-bound book out of a cabinet drawer. 

'"Here,' he said, 'in the founder's 
handwriting are recorded some of his 
wishes and hopes for the club's future.' 

"I have here a copy of what he read. 

"'My purpose has been to aid in estab- 
lishing a club where men who under ordi- 
nary circumstances would be constrained 
to lead lonely lives may find solace and 
profit in each other's company. The use- 
fulness and character of the club must 
depend altogether on its membership, 
which is quite beyond control of mine, and 
must depend upon the judgment of the 
trustees I have named, and of their suc- 
cessors by them to be named. We are 
agreed, they and I, that in considering 
persons suggested for membership char- 
acter shall be scrupulously weighed, but 

[373] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

reputation may be disregarded where it is 
known, or discovered, to be inconsistent 
with character. I recommend that no 
candidate shall ever be considered neces- 
sarily ineligible because of any past action, 
or any punishment incurred or endured, 
or any public or private disgrace, but that 
the true inwardness of the candidate at the 
time he is proposed and the chances of his 
future development shall alone be con- 
sidered.' 

*'*It is not to be expected that the 
trustees will discharge duties requiring 
the nicest judgment without sometimes 
making mistakes. Since the association 
planned is devised neither for purposes of 
restraint nor reformation, but of fellow- 
ship and wholesome pleasure, I am con- 
strained to remind them that in cases of 
doubt they should err on the side of safety, 
and rather reject or postpone worthy can- 
didates than admit such as may prove 
unfitc' 

[374] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

'"Precious are the fruits cyf effective 
discipline. If they are good enough for 
eternity, shall they not also be good 
enough for time ?' 

"That is all the founder had written. 
The constitution and laws of the club, 
Mr. Herrick went on to say, were framed 
by the trustees. They are brief and sim- 
ple, and he invited me to read them in 
the register in which, he said, if I ap- 
proved them, and when I was ready, I 
would be at liberty to sign my name. 
Meanwhile the club would be open to me, 
and I could get to know some of the other 
members. 

"I was greatly interested. 'What 
about initiation fees and dues.?' I asked. 

'"There is no initiation fee, and though 
there are dues, payment of them is op- 
tional. Men of the group from which 
the membership of the club is recruited 
are at a disadvantage in making a living, 
and some of them have dependent fami- 

[375] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

lies which need all they can earn. Mem- 
bers who can't afford to pay dues do not 
pay them. It is not intended that any 
man's membership shall lapse because of 
lack of means.' 

"I thought that very unusual, and won- 
dered how the club paid its bills. 

'"It was endowed,' he said. It owned 
its house, and had a revenue from in- 
vested funds sufficient to keep it going in 
a modest way, even if all dues failed. 
But two-thirds, or more, of the members 
did pay dues, and with the income from 
what was sold the finances of the club 
were always in good condition. Indeed 
in the last fifty years it had added very 
materially to its endowment fund. 

"I was surprised that it had been so 
long established. 

"It began nearly eighty years ago, he 
told me, and was therefore one of the 
oldest clubs in town. But its beginnings 
were modest, it had always been exceed- 

[376] 



THE QUONDAM CLUB 

ingly unobtrusive, and successive gifts 
and legacies had established it on a fiscal 
basis which had come to be strong. 

"Herrick's talk left me confident that I 
had found a home, and a week later, when 
I had come to know the members, I 
signed the register with a thankful heart. 
Ah, me, what an incomparable find for 
a shipwrecked and stranded mariner! 
What the place has been to me in the 
years since I first entered it is hardly to be 
set down in words. It has made life 
sweet again; sweet and tranquil in a way 
that I never knew before, so that Death 
may take his own time about coming, for 
I have no good reason yet to bid him 
hurry." 



[377 ] 



SEP 38 li08 



